A History of the National Reconnaissance Office – part 6

By Trowbridge H. Ford

 

While the Plumbers’ attempted assassination on May 15, 1972 of former Alabama Governor George Wallace assured President Nixon’s re-election in the November poll, it just increased the danger of their conspiracies being discovered during the trial of suspected assassin Arthur Bremer, some conspirator or person in the know turning whistleblower, or the deceased FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover – who they had apparently dispatched earlier to clear the way for the killing of the potentially most dangerous third-party candidate – having made some arrangement for their exposure if something like this happened, especially irrefutable evidence from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) that it had been recording LBJ’s telephone messages at his Texas ranch about ending the war in Vietnam at the height of the 1968 presidential campaign.  The White House and the Plumbers from the NRO, in sum, had to do everything they could to eliminate all suspicion that they had the motive, capability, and opportunity to kill the troublesome Southerner.

 

 The NRO was still officially an even more evanescent agency than its parent, the National Security Agency (NSA) aka No Such Agency.  It was only during Robert McNamara’s tenure at the Pentagon that it even got a toe-hold on what it designed, produced, and used for gathering signal intelligence, thanks to the SoD getting a director, like Alexander Flax, he could work with. Until then, as his successor John McLucas told the Defense Acquisition History Project on June 5, 2001, and shortly before he died, there had been such competition between it and the Air Force about how to produce planes and satellites, and such a circulation of leadership between government employment and the military-industrial complex because of congressional limitations on conflict of interest that the NRO was directed operationally by little more than uniformed personnel among its ranks who could order missions that NSA approved of.

 

 The best example of this was when Brigadier Jack Ledford apparently wanted a U-2 surveillance flight over Cuba to see if Castro was establishing a Soviet military presence on the island. .When the new NSA Director, Vice Admiral Lawrence Hugh (Jack) Frost, heard about it, he gave Ledford and other covert operators a dressing down in typical inter-service rivalry fashion which no one else appreciated, as James Bamford has quoted in Body of Secrets: ” ‘I saw him chew out Frank Raven, Bill Ray (senior NSA officials), and some Air Force brigadier general in a briefing,’ said Robert D. Farley, a former NSA historian. ‘Just the finger-on-the-chest bit.’ ” (.p. 96) Frost’s replacement, Air Force Lieutenant General Gordon Blake, learned the lesson all too well, though, when it came for aerial reconnaissance over the island during the Missile Crisis itself and its settlement, as the fate of downed U-2 pilots Major Rudolf Anderson and Captain Joe Glenn Hyde, Jr. indicated.

 

 Little wonder that McNamara replaced Blake at NSA after he had organized a united service effort to take the fight to the North Vietnamese to insure LBJ’s election with Army General Marshall Carter taking his place, and Dr. McLucas becoming the Air Force undersecretary to manage the NRO’s procurement of weapons, and operations..He got the agency to move beyond the cost-plus and fixed contract way of getting them, with suppliers having to pay back whatever they had received if the weapon did not prove capable, and reliable as they had claimed. Then the NRO returned to first building prototypes for the components of the Rhyoline satellites which the aerospace firm TRW was producing for it rather than just dream up something, like the Air Force was doing with a trial-and-error approach, in the hope that they worked. The pains-taking process of building complicated satellites was carried out at its M-4 facility in Redondo Beach, California, and the first one was put in geosynchronous orbit above Borneo, and its take was downloaded to a facility at Australia’s Pine Bluff in 1970. (For more, see  Bamford, p. 367ff.)

 

 The process became even smoother when former Congressman Melvin Laird became SoD, and David Packard, CEO of the giant electronics firm, joined him as deputy. For more, see this link:  http://www.history.army.mil/acquisition/research/int_mclucus.html

 

 To persuade Wallace that the White House had had nothing to do with the eavesdropping which almost cost him his life, Nixon arranged for political affairs assistant Harry Dent to visit Wallace in the hospital in Maryland, and Nixon’s personal physician William Lukash to check on his current condition.  To make sure that such concern was not considered politically intrusive, Senator Strom Thurmond was contacted to make sure that it was approved, and Nixon Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman was instructed to see what Wallace wanted, to “see if we can make a deal with him.”  (The Haldeman Diaries, June 12, 1972, p. 470)  Nixon worked on Reverend Billy Graham to make sure that the wounded Wallace stayed within the Democratic Party after its convention, making sure that he did not play the spoiler, and elect Senator McGovern even if it required a $750,000 payoff for his staff.

 

 To seal Wallace’s assurance that he would not run, former Texas Governor and Treasury Secretary John B. Connally paid Wallace a visit still in hospital.  Of course, Connally was an ideal choice, having himself been injured as presidential timber when he was almost assassinated when JFK was gunned down in Dallas.  To pressure Wallace still further, he contended that he was thinking of mounting a presidential campaign himself, and was desirous of hiring some of Wallace’s staff if he wasn’t. Wallace said to wait until the American Party convention occurred, as some kind of miracle might occur to make him change his mind.  “John was convinced that this is the most significant day in the campaign,” Haldeman concluded, “because Wallace is not going to run.” (Ibid., July 25, 1972, p. 486) 

 

 Bremer’s trial was expedited because the White House took over the investigation of the crime from Maryland officials, and saw to his prosecution as quickly as possible – before even Wallace’s ultimate state of health was determined.  Hours after the attempted assassination, Nixon took the unprecedented step of calling Assistant FBI Director Mark Felt for apparently the only time, softening him up to work the White House’s will by expressing the hope that Bremer had been “worked over pretty good” when he had been apprehended. Then the President told Felt that he didn’t want the murder inquiry extended by any slip-ups, as had occurred in the JFK assassination, and had caused them to become a national preoccupation.  “We’ll take care of that,” Felt reassured Nixon, as was reported by the AP in 2005 year, and puts to rest the claim that he was the whistle-blowing “Deep Throat”.  (For more on the real “Deep Throat”, see my two articles about Al Haig in my archive.)

 

 And Bremer’s court-appointed counsel, Benjamin Lipsitz, completely compromised his defense by introducing his alleged 137-page diary to help establish his irresponsible “schizophrenic” character, what began with him writing that he was setting out to assassinate either Nixon or Wallace – what rendered the President innocent of anything.  With the President off the hook as being behind the attempted murder, the court made short work of the defense, especially since the expert witnesses were evenly divided over Bremer’s mental state, resulting in his being given a 63-year sentence.  While it was reduced ten years in an unsuccessful appeal of the verdict, the Bureau belatedly investigated the crime for another eight years – resulting in the 26-volume WalShot file which only added suspicions of a White House conspiracy, and the dying Wallace in 1996 endorsed.

 

 While all this prevented any dangerous blowback from Wallace’s shooting, it did nothing to solve the question of what the Bureau’s deceased Director knew about Plumber operations – what had apparently led to his murder – and what measures he might have taken to guarantee their disclosure in case anything happened to him.  After all, most people have a lawyer, even if one is only to make up the terms of a will, and see to its execution after death, and Hoover, being such an important, controversial figure for so long, undoubtedly had one. 

 

 Yet, in reading biographies of him, one cannot find the name of any lawyer he could have trusted enough to have made him his own counsel – only the names of ones he hated, and tried to discredit with the help of other lawyers.  For example, Hoover used good friend and New York attorney Morris L. Ernst in this capacity to protect his and the Bureau’s reputation against Max Lowenthal’s proposed exposé of the FBI, but he, as Curt Gentry wrote in a footnote in J. Edgar Hoover, “objected, more than once, to Ernst characterizing himself as his ‘personal attorney’.” (p. 233) 

 

 Hoover’s personal attorney when he died was apparently Lawrence O’Brien, an employee of the Hughes Tool Company, and now the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) whose offices were in the Watergate.  Of course, both Nixon and Hoover had various relationships with the reclusive airplane, and film maker. The President and Felt had to worry that the former Director knew more than just brother Donald Nixon’s dealings with Hughes regarding financial and sexual irregularities, and that Hoover had passed the information to White House “enemies”  – what the Assistant Director had superficially covered up.  Now the fear allegedly was that the Cuban security service was passing information to the DNC about  Nixon’s attempts, with Hughes’s help, to assassinate the Cuban leader – the blowback from which resulted in JFK’s murder, and which LBJ would be in an ideal position to exploit.   

 

 Besides, O’Brien, as LBJ’s Postmaster General, had crossed the Director right after the Dallas assassination, as no one else had, in his dealing with former agent and now Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd, exposing the Bureau’s interception of a letter that a disgruntled staff assistant had sent to muckraker Jack Anderson, only for Hoover to find out that Dodd was hoping to replace him at the Bureau. Until then, Hoover had been making sure that the Bureau did nothing to uncover Dodd’s criminal ways.   “It was the unpardonable sin,” Gentry concluded. (p. 592)  O’Brien, on the other hand, gained the Director’s good graces.

 

 O’Brien had the closest relation possible with the eccentric billionaire and his company. In 1953, Hughes had turned over all his stock in the company to the Hughes Medical Company, a tax-exempt charity registered in Delaware which carried on medical research.  In 1968, when Congress was considering ending such exemptions, Hughes political operator Robert Maheu, who knew all about William King Harvey’s assassination plots against Castro and others, hired O’Brien to make sure that this didn’t happen, and O’Brien secured its continued exemption. This was when the Hughes empire was deeply involved in secret programs for the government, especially Senior Vice President at the Aircraft Company Tony Iorillo’s plan to design and build a gyrostat satellite for the NRO (Explorer 50) – lifting their size limitation, complexity and capabilities. (For details, see Bamford, pp. 343-6.)

 

 As Bamford described, despite the satellite’s capability, its messages just at this time from Firebase Sarge in Vietnam were completely ignored by NSA when the North Vietnamese build-up, north of the DMZ, occurred during January and February, 1972. NSA was too busy extending the satellite network that the NRO was constructing over the globe to read what was its take.On March 30th,  the North Vietnamese attacked, and staged the biggest victory over American and South Vietnamese forces since the Tet-offensive back in 1968.  This Easter offensive left no trace of either the Explorer system, or the defeat on the battlefield with the American public. “The war was over,” Bamford concluded, “and the United States had lost.” (p. 346)

 

 John Mitchell, now chairman of the Campaign to Re-Elect the President, and his chief adviser, Frederick LaRue, were so afraid of O’Brien’s potential to cause trouble in this environment that they ordered a break-in, and bugging of the DNC at the Watergate on March 20, 1972 – what had to be postponed until both Hoover and Wallace were put out of the way, as I have already explained.  They were particularly interested in finding out if O’Brien had somehow gotten vital information from Hoover, especially NRO documents about Nixon’s “November Surprise” in the 1968 election, the Plumbers’ composition and operations, the destruction of the Explorer system monitoring the DMZ in Vietnam, and the unexpected presence of the Secret Service agents in Bremer’s apartment when Bureau agents, thanks to Felt’s direction, arrived.  It was suspected that O’Brien was still receiving similar information – what could constitute a Democratic “November Surprise” in the upcoming presidential election, resulting in an instruction also to tap his telephone and to bug his office.

 

 The results were two break-ins of the DNC, the first one on Sunday, May 28th, and the second on June 17th, after several, it seems, false starts – what might well have been invented after the burglars were arrested to give the false impression of how unprofessional the operation had been from the outset. (For more on this, see Fred Emery, Watergate, p. 118ff.)  The trouble with the first break-in was that its one successful tap was not on a phone being used by O’Brien. Furthermore, the CRP was no longer interested in current party activities but what the DNC, as J. Gordon Liddy later explained, “…had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him. (Quoted from Emery, p. 125.  Italics Liddy’s) 

 

 Of course, the best source of such information would be Hoover’s own files or copies of them – what the Plumbers went back in the hope of photographing three weeks later. “They want everything in the files,” former CIA security agent James McCord explained to an incredulous Howard Hunt, the mission’s operational chief who had put together the forged documents (code name GEMSTONE), implicating JFK in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. 

 

 While the new mission planned to take pictures of 1,800 documents in files in the office on 50 rolls of film – what required having a key somehow to Secretary to the Director of the State Chairman Ida “Maxie” Wells’ desk where all the necessary file cabinet keys were kept. They were to photograph incriminating evidence the DNC had regarding Nixon – e.g., the Director’s file of infra-red photos that the CIA had engaged MI6 to take in Hong Kong when alleged Red Chinese spy Marianna Liu visited Nixon’s bedroom, the recorded messages of South Vietnam’s “November Surprise” which torpedoed Humphrey’s election, the defeat there which NRO’s Explorer system had recorded, etc.  

 

 The Plumber mission was deliberately sabotaged by McCord failing to remove the tapes from doors down to the garage-level entrance he used to re-enter the complex, fearing apparently that a successful operation would so reveal misdoings by the Agency that the White House would be bound to take drastic action against it. Of course, this reason had to be covered up in all accounts by all kinds of bogus claims – Hoover was just protecting disclosure of his homosexuality rather than that at the White House, the Agency was protecting itself for having arranged on its own for Hughes to build the Glomar Explorer to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine (Project Jennifer), the DNC was protecting itself against disclosure of a sex ring John W. Dean’s bride-to-be was helping run from it to blackmail politicians, especially Republicans, etc. 

 

 The arrest of the five burglars – followed shortly thereafter by those of Hunt, Liddy and lookout Alfred Baldwin – made what they were trying to photograph hardly a concern at all.  The White House was most eager just to dismiss it as an ill-conceived rogue operation, and when it couldn’t, it tried to get the Bureau to just stick to the suspects, and the Agency to provide a national security cover against it being exposed while behind the scenes it attempted to secure the silence in various ways of those accused, and others involved, particularly Plumber secretary Kathleen Chenow.  If she started talking to the Bureau, all the White House plots risked being exposed. 

 

 Dean, the President’s counsel, was responsible for keeping the cover up under control, especially her. (See Emery, p. 201)  The basic details of the cover-ups were contained in the June 20th tape of the conversation between Nixon and Haldeman in the EOB – what became known ultimately as the “181/2 minute gap” and “the smoking gun” when, in fact, the whole discussion had been erased. “The conclusion was,” Nixon’s Chief of Staff wrote in his diaries, “that we’ve got to hope that the FBI doesn’t go beyond what’s necessary in developing evidence and that we can keep a lid on that, as well as keeping all the characters involved from getting carried away with unnecessary testimony.” (p. 473)

 

 For the Oval Office, the immediate problems were to get John Mitchell to give up being CRP Chairman, O’Brien to give up any thoughts of helping torpedo somehow Nixon’s re-election, and Vice President Spiro Agnew to step aside so that former Treasury Secretary John B. Connally could take his place on the Republican ticket – what would render any SIGINT intelligence about them or had by them as benign as possible. Lookout Baldwin had indicated to his lawyers that he was willing to go after Mitchell, and while he didn’t have the evidence to prove his case, it was feared that O’Brien did, especially since he issued a statement stating that the break-in “raised the ugliest question about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter century of political activity.”  (Quoted from Emery, p. 159.)

 

 To force Mitchell’s resignation, his wife Martha, who was campaigning for the President’s re-election, started speaking out wildly about her husband, claiming Nixon’s henchmen Erlichman and Haldeman had called her husband at the crack of dawn in California to inform him of the arrests. Then she made hysterical calls to the famous UP White House reporter, Helen Thomas, claiming that her husband was involved in Watergate, and that she was going to kick him out of the house “…if John didn’t get out of politics…” – a conversation she terminated by pulling the phone line out of the wall.  Bob Woodward paid a visit to her Essex House apartment in NYC to get an exclusive interview in which she stated she was writing a book about the “dirty politics” which were required to get statesmen like Nixon elected.  Because of Martha’s erratic behavior – conveniently assumed to be the result of her growing alcoholism – Mitchell resigned at the end of June.

 

 O’Brien, instead of getting the inquiry he demanded about the break-in, was subjected to a wide-ranging criminal investigation, and political attacks while the White House continued to manage its cover-up of Plumber operations.The Justice Department and the IRS started a criminal inquiry into his possible tax evasion on the Howard Hughes yearly retainer – what was serious enough to scare him off from being Senator George McGovern’s Vice Presidential candidate. 

 

 Besides, LBJ was unwilling to endorse McGovern because he thought he was all wrong about Vietnam, promising to work behind the scenes to help Nixon’s re-election.  Ultimately, the pursuit of O’Brien on unpaid taxes for $190,000 from Hughes would turn out to be a “dry hole”, as Erlichman reported in September – as he was cleared in an IRS audit – but the threat had been good enough to move him out of the picture, as he obviously did not want a detailed scrutiny of his finances.

 

 Getting rid of Agnew was a more difficult matter, as he was Vice President, and the only real successor to Nixon was Connally, though he did not think that he could follow the President by becoming Spiro’s successor. Besides, Agnew was the vital connection to the Mafia, and able to mobilize Democrats for Nixon by his bitter attacks on McGovern, though bringing his own psychological soundness into question in the process.  Frank Sinatra, leader of Hollywood’s Rat Pack who had just arranged Mafioso Angelo DeCarlo’s early release from prison and pardon through Agnew by giving John Dean $100,000 in cash as an “unrecorded contribution”, and another $50,000 to the CRP, was most unhappy with having to deal with Connally now in such matters – what was resolved by having the singer lead a celebrity reception at the Residence.

 

 More important, Agnew had been responsible for the appointment of Chalres C. Richey, a Democrat, as a federal judge whose ex-parte statements about the $1,000,000 civil-damage action the DNC had initiated against the CRP’s Maurice Stans for the break-in, and whose pushing for a plea-bargain settlement of a Mann Act prosecution of Phillip Bailley proved most beneficial to the White House. Richey”…told Roemer,” counsel for the RNC, Dean told Nixon,”he thought Maury (Stans) ought to file a counter libel action.” (Quoted from Silent Coup, 226.)  The criminal prosecution of Bailley similarly got nowhere when the judge said to the parties that it was in the interest of all to settle the action without further inquiry. The only party whose interest was served by the settlement was John Dean’s as Bailley, as his address book showed, was helping run a prostitution ring out of the DNC to get dirt on its politicians with the help of Dean’s wife-to-be, Maureen Biner.

 

 In sum, nothing was done to get rid of Agnew until the prosecution of the Plumbers, and Nixon’s re-election was successfully negotiated.  Of course, the coup de grace to the Democrats had been National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s apparently arranging a successful conclusion to the Vietnam War. The settlement was essentially what LBJ had negotiated back in 1968, though this time there was no trouble, it seemed, from President Thieu after Kissinger went to Saigon to get him to go along.  “We’d have everything done by the end of the year,” Kissinger told Nixon, DNSA Haig, and Haldeman on October 12th. 

 

 Unfortunately, the NSA did not even reach a settlement, much less its implementation by year’s end – as Thieu was increasingly objecting to what was being proposed – inducing Nixon to appoint Agnew to force him to agree: “He is to convince Thieu as leader of the hawks,” Haldeman wrote in his diaries, “that there will be no support for him unless he goes along.” (p. 553)  

 

 To soften up the North Vietnamese to accept the plan too, Nixon authorized B-52 raids on the North, and the reseeding of Haiphong Harbor with mines. After four weeks of devastating raids, reminiscent of Operation Arc Light carried out after the Tonkin Gulf incidents, the North Vietnamese and South Vietnam’s President were forced to settle.  Of course, the bombing campaign put the NRO under the greatest strain to gather satellite intelligence of targets through its station at Pine Gap – what risked causing a political rupture with Australia’s government if exposed.

  

 Haldeman put the result of  Vice President’s mission this way in the January 23rd entry: “Thieu had finally capitulated a few days before.”  Agnew was so pleased with his negotiating skills that he requested a meeting with the wary Nixon during which he proposed to …”take a trip to Egypt to visit Sadat, and see if he could try and untangle something on the Middle East.” The incredulous President explained it all to Agnew wanting to rebuild his image.

 

 Agnew had given Thieu the same aim when he strong-armed him into accepting the terms of the proposed settlement, as he apparently did try to improve his image in America in a way the White House least expected – telling LBJ how he had been persuaded by the current Vice President not to take the terms Johnson was proposing four years earlier.  Dean had already called for hard evidence to prove that LBJ had ordered the FBI to bug Nixon’s plane during the 1968 campaign to counter the fallout from the Watergate convictions, and when the former President heard that the Bureau’s former executive Cartha ‘Deke’ De Loach was looking into the matter, “…LBJ got very hot, and called Deke, and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release (deleted material – national security), saying that our side was asking that certain things be done.” (Haldeman, January 12, 1973, p. 567)  De Loach, Haldeman added, took this as a direct threat.

 

 While De Loach indicated that LBJ had called for bugging Nixon’s plane – a request he claimed the Bureau declined – and a check of Mrs. Anna Chennault phone calls, and a tap put on her phone, LBJ obviously had other ideas, and planned to come to Washington to make his case among disgruntled Democrats. “Mitchell,” Haldeman added, “also said he was meeting with O’Brien today, and will make reference to this whole thing in that meeting and see what he can smoke out.”

 

 Undoubtedly, the former Attorney General was looking for confirmation that LBJ had the NRO’s goods on Nixon’s meddling – his “November Surprise” back in 1968 – and had confided documents and Thieu’s testimony in the DNC Chairman about it all. It was all shaping as a most unprecedented inaugural for Nixon.  (For more on this, see the January 11, 1973 tape of the conversation in the Oval Office between Nixon and Haldeman in Stanley I. Kutler, ed. Abuse of Power, pp. 202-4 – noting in passing that it is not followed by another taped recording for three weeks, the biggest gap of all.)

 

 Former President Johnson died on the plane while making his way back from Washington on January 22nd, apparently victim of a heart attack, reminiscent of how Hoover had died.  Of course, he could have died from the angina he was suffering from, popping nitroglycerin pills often to keep the pain manageable, though the trip itself – what he felt impelled to make to rebuild his reputation – killed him. The actual cause of death we will never know, as there was no autopsy, as in Hoover’s case.

 

 There is still alarming evidence that he did not die a natural death.  Johnson’s trip back to Texas had been supervised by White House Dr. Walter Tkasch, a physician noted for giving the patient what he wanted, and a good friend of the Agency’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb who was currently running its ORD program, the successor to MK-ULTRA. (For more on this, see the article about DCI Richard Helms.) In 1968, ORD people set up a joint program with the Army Chemical Corps (Project OFTEN) to study the effects of various drugs on living creatures.It hoped to discover, John Marks quoted a researcher saying in The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, “a compound that could simulate a heart attack or a stroke in the targeted individual.” (p. 227)

 

 Was LBJ that targeted individual?  Marks certainly made it sound so when he added this about the just sacked DCI because of his failure to provide Agency cover for the Watergate:  “In January 1973, just as Richard Helms was leaving the Agency and James Schlesinger was coming in, Project OFTEN was abruptly canceled.”

 

 Some other unlikely changes, or just coincidences, included Laird – the elected official best known for stating the politicians have to live longer with their consciences than with their constituents – resigned hurriedly just a week about LBJ died. Laird had joined Nixon in getting Thieu to reject his intended surprise to help Humphrey win the November 1968 presidential election, and he knew that Johnson’s survivors had the goods on his dirty work, so his sudden departure from the Washington scene reduced the need of exposing it.

 

 To replace him, Nixon quickly got Elliot Richardson – the Secretary of Health, Education, and Environment, and who went on to become Attorney General just four months later when the Watergate scandal was really heating up – in the Pentagon office, and the move seemed like another convenient means of a cover up.  Richardson, as we shall see, was involved in seeing if dilantin, a pill that Nixon was taking for his depression, could be approved for general public consumption for almost anything by the department.

 

 Then when Schlesinger moved from the Agency to the  Pentagon for more house cleaning, he made McLucus Secretary of the Air Force, the first undersecretary to be so advanced, so that he could explain whatever the NRO had been doing which required some public explaining.

 

 Of course, the first thing that comes to mind are the tapes it had amassed about the details of the former President’s sudden death when he was taken back to his Texas ranch on Air Force One, and arranging a cover up there with Lady Bird about what had happened – one so successful that the public still believes that he died while having a long sojourn there! 

  

 

 

 

 

A History of America’s National Reconnaissance Office – part 5

By Trowbridge H. Ford

　
Never was there a stranger presidential year than 1972 – when President Richard Nixon was apparently poised for successful re-election while his “tricky” bits along the way were threatening to surface in a devastating fashion. After three hard years of effort, the Vietnamese war finally seemed on the verge of ending despite the secret campaign the White House had been conducting at home and abroad while trying to decouple the communist powers from the process by opening the door to Red China’s recognition, and seeking a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviets. Nonetheless, the Oval Office was most worried of the public learning of the conniving its occupant had used in getting there, the most conspiratorial way it operated once there, and its reckless gambling with the future in order to remain.

Efforts to stop knowledgeable whistleblowers, especially former agent to CIA’s top officials Victor Marchetti, from publishing works on Agency deceptions was just a stop-gap effort as others were bound to come along. While prepublication review by the CIA of proposed work, and secrecy contracts for all employees of covert government – something difficult to arrange with those already hired – promised to stem the tide of revelations of shoddy, if not illegal, work, there was still the problem of the secret documents themselves, especially signal intelligence aka SIGINT, especially from NSA’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), surfacing – exposure of which would blow Nixon’s ship of state right out of the water.

1972 was most concerning from the outset in this regard, as Nixon was facing re-election – what he hoped to showcase with a successful conclusion to the war in Southeast Asia. In the year’s State of the Union Address, the President announced a further 70,000-man reduction of American forces in South Vietnam – one indicating that full Vietnamization of the struggle was just a short matter of time – while mentioning National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese for a settlement: an American withdrawal in exchange for the return of those Americans missing in action, a cease-fire, and new elections in South Vietnam – what was intended to break the deadlock in discussions.

The prospect raised the ugly issue of what would happen to South Vietnam’s current President, Nguyen Van Thieu, if peace was agreed to but if he refused again to go along – what he had done during the last days of the 1968 election campaign in America. On October 31, 1968, LBJ announced a bombing halt in Vietnam, and the assembling of the parties in Paris in the hope that the war could be settled. Two days later, though, Thieu refused to attend the negotiations, and the effort failed. Thieu’s refusal was apparently crucial in preventing Democratic Party candidate Hubert Humphrey from snatching victory from the jaws of defeat – what JFK had allegedly done eight years earlier by taking advantage of the secret plans to invade Cuba at the former Republican Vice President’s expense. Thanks to Thieu’s refusal, LBJ’s ploy fell short, and Nixon narrowly won the election.

Of course, Johnson suspected a plot – what was soon established, but he declined to make public, even in his memoirs, The Vantage Point, his highly secretive sources: the Bureau’s bugs and surveillance of South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem and Anna Chennault – wife of the celebrated chief of the Flying Tigers in China during WWII, General Claire Chennault – the Agency’s bugs on President Thieu’s office in Saigon; and the NRO’s regularly encrypted diplomatic traffic between the South Vietnamese Capital and its embassy in Washington. “There is little doubt that during the final stages of the campaign,” Christopher Andrew wrote in For the President’s Eyes Only, “Anna Chennault passed on a ‘very important’ message from the Nixon camp that was intended to dissuade Thieu from agreeing to attend the Paris peace talks until after the election.” (p. 349)

Johnson was apparently persuaded that he had “no reason to think” that Nixon “was himself involved in this maneuvering, but a few individuals in his campaign were.” (Jon Weiner, “Another ‘October Surprise’,” The Nation, November 6, 2000)

Of course, Nixon knew better, and he was already deeply involved in trying to solve the problem – get rid of the members of his campaign who were, destroy the evidence of this “October Surprise”, and make sure that Thieu could not kibosh any peace settlement now. While many critics have pooh-poohed Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power – like his previous exposés of the JFK assassination, and FBI Directory Hoover because of minor errors, and unsubstantiated speculation – it nailed down who were the culprits in Nixon’s campaign staff, New York attorney John Mitchell, and Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Spiro Agnew, who were dealing with the famous Chinese lady. “In interviews with Summers,” Wiener wrote,”she said he met with Nixon and his campaign manager (and future Attorney General), John Mitchell, who told her to inform Saigon that if Nixon won the election, South Vietnam would get ‘a better deal’.” Furthermore, Summers established that the ‘Boss’ who told her to pass along the message to Thieu, “Hold on, we are gonna win,” was Agnew – while on flight stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico on November 2, 1968.

Nixon was trying to solve the problem by getting rid of Director Hoover – what would end his threats to leading Republican leaders – but without any success because of all the files he had on “Tricky Dick” and others. In October 1971, Nixon vowed to get rid of Hoover, but the President got cold feet during the showdown. Then in December, at Nixon’s home in Key Biscayne, he apparently tried to persuade the Director to retire, but failed. Nixon even invited Hoover to accompany him back to Washington on Air Force One – even presenting him with a cake for his seventy-seventh birthday – in the hope that this sign of favor would soften him up to retire.

All the while, Nixon officials in the Justice Department were desperately trying to locate the Director’s most sensitive files, some of which involved the NRO – ones about his affair, starting in 1958 in Hong Kong, and still continuing until Nixon was inaugurated, with Marianna Liu, suspected of being a Red Chinese agent; his working with the Bureau which apparently doctored Alger Hiss’s typewriter to secure his 1948 conviction of perjury; his helping Nixon become Eisenhower’s running mate, and the Republican candidate for President in 1960; looking for more dirt on Edward Kennedy after Chappaquiddick; falsely telling Nixon after he was elected President that LBJ had been bugging his airplane during the final two weeks of the campaign, etc. – and to destroy them, a process which only started in earnest after the Director died.

Actually, the Director went out of his way to frighten Nixon because of his pressuring him to retire – what may well have led to Hoover’s convenient death. Columnist Jack Anderson, a growing thorn in the White House’s side, somehow obtained in early March a copy of lobbyist Dita Beard’s memo, claiming that International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) had obtained a favorable Justice Department ruling in an anti-trust suit in 1971 in return for contributing secretly $400,000 and services to the Republican National Convention in San Diego – a quid pro quo which would allow the White House direct access to secret transmissions it was interested in, especially the coded messages between the government in South Vietnam and its embassy in Washington while getting President Thieu on board for a settlement.

The disclosure could not have been a worse one, and could not have occurred at a worse time. The memo completely disrupted what had been agreed to at Camp David on January 28th – the announcement of Mitchell’s resignation on February 15th, and his replacement by Richard Kleindienst, his deputy. Mitchell would return to his law firm which had represented ITT in its disputes with the government, and run the campaign to re-elect Nixon. Also, the White House was planning to get rid of the troublemaking Vice President, Spiro Agnew, especially over Vietnam – what would remove from the scene the two most vulnerable of Nixon’s associates involved in making the “November Surprise” which sank Humphrey’s presidential ambitions.

The disclosure forced Kleindienst, who was being questioned now by the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as Attorney General, to ultimately withdraw his nomination, and Agnew was recruited by Mitchell into the White House task force to prevent dangerous blowback about ITT which threatened even Nixon himself. This clearly involved not only insider-trading with its stock but also the White House using ITT as its own SIGINT service, as Robert Haldeman dutifully recorded on March 5th in his diaries: “P(resident) was concerned about what’s at the root of all this, where did his story start, who leaked the memo, who was it written to, and so forth. We don’t seem to have the answers on any of that.” (pp. 425-26) While the White House was being obliged to stick with Spiro, Nixon was most concerned that Colson, his special counsel, and handler of The Plumbers aka the Special Investigations Unit, kept a low profile during the whole affair.

Nixon had good reason for Colson to play it cool, as he had recommended the burning down of a famous Washington research institution when The Plumbers started looking for documents regarding important leaks and leakers, as Woodward and Bernstein recorded in All the President’s Men – what even his naive superior, John Dean, had enough sense to call off: “Morton Halperin, Daniel Ellsberg’s friend whose telephone was among the ‘Kissinger taps,’ was believed to have kept some classified documents when he left Kissinger’s staff to become a fellow at the Brookings Institution (a center for the study of public policy questions).” (p. 324) It was the beginning of the Plumber project of dirty tricks, code-named “Gemstone”. Of course, the White House wanted the papers back but not yet at this expense. Moreover, it wanted to minimize the possibilities of such blunders by recruiting ITT as its own SIGINT service – what would cut the NRO and NSA out of the process.

The Nixon White House had something really big planned with ITT, as was demonstrated by the lengths it went to in order to get Ms. Beard to repudiate the memo, and to cover up what was really planned with the communications giant. Plumber Hunt, using a CIA-supplied red wig, went to see her in a Denver hospital to get her to deny the memo’s authenticity. Then the White House tried to make out that ITT was the initiator of all the deals involving it, especially the prevention of socialist Salvatore Allende becoming President of Chile, and that they simply concerned money – what was patently untrue.

John McCone, former DCI, and now ITT’s director, offered the Agency in 1970 $1,000,000 to stop Allende’s election – what DCI Helms made sure looked like the CIA had sought, and when it came time to censor Marchetti’s manuscript. Shortly thereafter, Anthony Sampson’s exposé of the international conglomerate, The Sovereign State of ITT, appeared, but it was so involved in talking about its past international meddling, especially on both sides during WWII, that it never got round to the present.

To stop the rot, Nixon had John Dean visit Hoover in the hope of getting the Director to declare the memo a fake. The encounter was a bruising one for the President’s young counsel. After Dean had hesitantly explained to J. Edgar what the White House wanted, he said – after telling a tale about how Anderson was even willing to go through his trash and its dog shit for a story – that he would be pleased to test its authenticity. As Hoover was ushering Dean out, he even volunteered material from his famous files, as Curt Gentry wrote in J. Edgar Hoover, on the troublesome reporter.

Given the fact that ITT had already tested the memo’s authenticity, and the expert, Pearl Tytell, had staked her reputation on its being a recent forgery, Nixon was ecstatic over the probable result – comparing it to how the testing of Alger Hiss’s typewriter had led to his undoing: “The typewriters are always the key.” (Quoted from Gentry, p. 716.)

The President was totally unprepared for the result. Ivan Conrad, head of the Bureau’s Laboratory, found that the memo was apparently typed around the date indicated on it, and that it was probably genuine. Of course, Nixon was beside himself over the result, uttering that it was Hoover who hated Anderson. To change the outcome so that it did not contradict what the ITT expert had found, White House officials pressured the Director, and Nixon even wrote a personal note to Hoover, asking him to “cooperate”. Of course, if he had, not only would his continuance at the Bureau been assured but also the cosy relationship the White House had with the SIGINT giant. Ms. Beard’s lawyers even released her sworn affidavit, denying her early claims to Anderson. Still, Hoover would not budge, and on March 23rd, the Senate received Hoover’s verdict – what ended any hope of Kliendienst becoming Attorney General.

Hoover appeared to be in the driver’s seat, given his “back channel” to all kinds of secrets, mostly SIGINT in nature, which threatened disastrous consequences if Nixon fired him. The most talked about source was the taping system that the Director had secretly installed in the Oval Office, but there were many more sources than that. Their scope indicated that Hoover had something even more comprehensive than ITT, most likely the NRO itself. Remember the Director had cut all Bureau liaison with the CIA, DIA, NSA, Secret Service, IRS, etc., but it needed SIGINT in order to prevent some terrible disaster, like another assassination, so there had to be a back channel with the NRO.

It would not have required much from the Director to expand what it was already providing the Bureau in the name of law-enforcement, and nation security. All Hoover would have needed to justify wider coverage was to say that the Bureau was looking into the possibility of some presidential candidate trying to pull off another “November surprise” about the Vietnam war in the hope of stealing the election.

And if not the NRO, perhaps the Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA), now headed by the disgruntled, former head of NRO, Dr. Alexander Flax, who had resigned because of the White House’s resumption of efforts to win the war three years earlier. Given what McCone was doing for the White House at ITT, it seems likely that Flax would reciprocate in kind for the whistle-blowing Hoover. The IDA had authority to investigate any national security issue for government departments which was science-related, and it could call upon the Pentagon to provide any information which would be used to help test improvements in law-enforcement, technical equipment, communication security, etc.

The crucial importance of Hoover now was demonstrated in what the Plumbers were doing. Since their pursuit of leakers, especially Daniel Ellsberg, had led nowhere despite their break-in, with CIA assistance, of his psychiatrist’s office in California, they had then been looking into getting rid of Anderson – a possible operation in the Gemstone plan. In late March, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with the Agency’s Dr. Edward Gunn, an expert on poisons, and neutralizing drugs, and discussed with him how they might incapacitate someone of Scandinavian descent. With the Director proving to be the real danger, though, the focus of the covert operations turned to knocking Alabama Governor George C. Wallace out of the presidential campaign.

Nixon had originally urged the Southerner to compete in the Democratic primaries to help divide its supporters, especially to protect against Teddy Kennedy suddenly attempting to grab the nomination, but Wallace was increasingly proving to be a threat to Nixon’s re-election, particularly when Senator George McGovern proved to be a candidate in his own right and not just a stalking horse for the Massachusetts Senator. The turning point had been the Florida primary which Nixon had urged Wallace to enter, via Bob Haldeman and crony Bebe Rebozo, and he had proven that he was not just a red-neck from south of the Mason-Dixon Line by knocking out Senator Muskie, the Democratic front-runner, for all intents and purposes.

While the Plumbers had an ideal candidate, a Manchurian one, for knocking out Wallace, if circumstances so required, they had to be worried about any replay of the MLK and RFK assassinations at the expense of a real conservative. In 1968, Hoover, as Anthony Summers wrote in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, laughed off a bid to join Wallace’s ticket as Vice Presidential candidate in order to secure his stay as Director. (p. 369)

The Plumbers, thanks to the efforts by Executive-action specialist William King Harvey, had recruited an ideal assassin, young Arthur Bremer from Milwaukee, for any assassination. Harvey was now a particular red-flag for the Director because he reminded him of the treachery that trusted aide William Sullivan, another strong advocate of covert action, had just engaged in with the White House to get him retired, and to replace him. Sullivan had been forced to resign the previous August.

Hoover was surprisingly candid when he spoke about the Nixon’s relationship with the Plumbers, particularly Harvey, as Summers has reported: “The President is a good man. He’s a patriot. But he listens to some wrong people. By God, he’s got some former CIA men working for him that I’d kick out of my office. Someday that bunch will serve him up a fine mess.” (Quoted from p. 409.) Since Hoover had kicked Harvey out of his office back in the summer of 1947, there is little doubt that he had especially had him in mind.

Moreover, the total composition of the Plumbers has always been deliberately a bit vague to hide the membership of some notorious characters, as their secretary, Kathleen Chenow, explained to reporters Woodward and Bernstein when the Assistant Attorney General was apparently attempting to get Hoover’s files for the White House: “There was another occasion when Mr. Maridan was at a big meeting in Mr. Krogh’s office with Liddy, Hunt and three or four people I didn’t recognize.” (Quoted from All the President’s Men, p. 216)

No one has ever seen fit to determine who they might be, and she certainly knew the personnel who regularly worked out of room 16 on the ground floor in the Old Executive Office Building. Along with Harvey, the men seem to have been Felipe Vidal aka Felipe DeDiego and Charles Morgan, Humberto Lopez, and Jaime Ferrer – an anti-Castro group to carry out assassinations since the Bay of Pigs Operation.

Since Hoover was now playing hard ball with the White House – amassing files on all its buggings, intercepts, and break-ins – nothing rash could be attempted until the Director was clearly out of the way. After all, Hoover had recently explained to journalist Andrew Tully that the Plumbers “…think they can get away with murder.” (Quote from Official and Confidential, p. 409.) According to an article Mark Frazier published in The Harvard Crimson, this group placed a thiophosphate type poison in Hoover’s toilet articles after a previous break-in of his home had failed to find the documents Hoover was holding over the President’s head. “Ingestion,” Summers explained, “can result in a fatal heart seizure and can be detected only if an autopsy is performed within hours of death.” (p. 415)

On May 2, 1972, the Director seems to have suffered such a heart seizure after Nixon had called him shortly before midnight, and told him that he must retire. Hoover’s blood-pressure obviously soared after hearing of the fatal, final showdown with the President, and he must have gone to the medicine chest for medication required, only to ingest the thiophosphate which left him dead on the floor of his bedroom in a couple of hours.

The next morning, while Nixon cronies L. Patrick Gray and Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt, now falsely aka “Deep Throat”, were stripping Hoover’s home of all its documents and seeing that they were shredded, the medical examiners, after contacting NYC’s Medical Examiner Dr. Milton Helpern, decided that the Director had died of natural causes, requiring no autopsy. Later, Felt explained: “For me, it was no personal loss. I never did feel emotional about it. My main thought that day was about the problems created by his death.” (Quoted from Summers, p. 428.)

With Hoover out of the way, Harvey’s men moved quickly to finish off Wallace. Bremer, like Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver, was already well prepared for the job, having been subjected to “psychic-driving” reminiscent of how James Earl Ray had been programmed to kill Dr. King – what would be repeated when it came time for Mark David Chapman to kill Beatle John Lennon. Law enforcement officers were already on the lookout for Bremer after he was arrested on November 18, 1971 for carrying a concealed weapon! For good measure, Bremer bought a Charter Arms .38 caliber revolver at Milwaukee’s Casanova Guns, Inc. on January 13 – the same day that he broke up his relationship with teenager Joan Pemrich, and Wallace announced his third run for the Presidency. Bremer purchased a 9mm Browning pistol on February lst.

By the end of March, the Plumber operation was transferred to Milwaukee. Of course, this led to secretary Chenow’s office being the center of all kinds of communications which Hoover was undoubtedly receiving copies of. The most likely hypnotist to have programmed Bremer was Dr. William Joseph Bryan, who had helped solve the Boston Strangler murder case by hypnotizing suspect, Albert DiSalvo – a name that Sirhan Sirhan had mysteriously written in his notebook before he shot at RFK. Bryan, during the last two years of his life, boasted to two call girls who “serviced” him regularly before he died in 1977, William Turner and Jonn Christian reported in The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, not only “about hypnotizing Sirhan, but also about working for the CIA on ‘top secret projects’.” (Jonathan Vankin & John Whalen, The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, p. 371)

During April, Bremer stalked both Wallace and Nixon in a way which would be repeated eight years later when John Hinckley, Jr. pursued President Carter and Ronald Reagan. Of course, it was much easier for Bremer to gain access to Wallace than to Nixon, even when the President visited Ottawa in Canada, but the programmed assassin explained his aims in ways reminiscent of Hinckley. “Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace,” as Dan T. Carter quoted in The Politics of Rage. “I intend to shoot one or the other while he attends a champange (sic) rally for the Wisconsin Presidential Preference Primary.” (p. 419) Nixon, though, never campaigned in Wisconsin, so Bremer was just screwing himself up for some wild aggression against the Alabama Governor when the time came.

Bremer – whose income for 1971 was a measly $1,611 – went on a wild spree in NYC, staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, renting a Lincoln Continental, and seeking sexual pleasure with prostitutes but without any success. Then, reminiscent of how Ray drove around the South, looking for Dr. King, Bremer flew back to Milwaukee, packed his Rambler with his guns, and went to Ottawa again, and to Washington to shoot Nixon, only to report bitterly in his diary: “ALL MY EFFORTS & NOTHING CHANGED. Just another god Damn failure.” With Wallace poised to win the Democratic Primary in Michigan, clinching his hold on the Midwest Rust Belt, Nixon was suddenly confronted by a probable third-party candidate who could spoil his re-election.

During the two weeks after Hoover’s death, Bremer’s wild behavior alerted police and the Secret Service that he was a threat, but the questions were to whom and where. As Wallace was winning the South, Bremer was reading Robert Kaiser’s R.F.K. Must Die, and attended Stanley Kubrick’s film “A Clockwork Orange” at Milwaukee’s Mayfair Shopping Center Cinema, imagining that he was actor Alek in the film, and he was getting the Governor. On May 9th, Bremer claimed that only two girls prevented him from shooting Wallace when he attended a rally in Dearborn. Four days later, he arrived five hours before Wallace’s scheduled appearance at Kalamazoo’s National Guard Armory, and when questioned by police about his unusual behavior, he just said he wanted to make sure he got a good seat.

Two days later, Bremer gunned down Wallace, and three others, including SS agent Nick Zarvos, when he attended the Laurel shopping center in Maryland. No one was killed, but the Governor was severely wounded, resulting in paralysis from the waist down, and essentially settling the election. (For more on the assassination, see my “Manchurian Candidates:Mind-Control Experiments and The Deadliest Secrets of the Cold War,” Eye Spy magazine, Issue Eight 2002, p. 50ff.) “Nixon now knew for certain,” Fred Emery wrote in Watergate, “he would not be threatened by a Wallace third-party candidacy as in 1968.” (p. 115) Of course, officially Nixon acted as if it were just an unexpected occurrence, and did what he could to ease the pain of the Wallaces by getting former Treasury Secretary John Connally to do whatever was necessary to get them to retire quietly from the political scene.

Behind the scenes, though, the President and his covert operators worked frantically to make sure that there was no incriminating evidence back in Bremer’s apartment. The FBI, under Mark Felt’s leadership, proving that he was no “Deep Throat”, made no immediate attempt to seal it, and, as a consequence, it was stripped of anything of interest by curious reporters and other unknown parties, the leading member of which must have been Harvey. Felt even knew of Bremer’s identity and residence while claiming to Colson that the Bureau knew nothing about the shooting.

“Hunt’s story,” Emery added, “was that Colson first asked him to break into Bremer’s rented rooms in Milwaukee in search of incriminating materials, then called it off. (pp. 115-6) Harvey’s people had apparently made Hunt’s trip unnecessary. When the Bureau agents arrived at the apartment, they got into a dispute with the SS about who should have control of it. Colson then tried to convince Felt that Bremer had ties with the Kennedy and McGovern camps.

In sum, the killing of Hoover allowed Nixon to insure his re-election by having the Plumbers dispose of Wallace with little difficulty because of Felt’s considerable assistance at the Bureau. And it was all deemed necessary because of the SIGINT that the Director had garnered, especially from the NRO.

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A History of America’s National Reconnaissance Office – part 4

By Trowbridge H. Ford

Whenever a new administration takes over in Washington, especially that of the other party, there is a vast change in the Executive Branch because of policy needs, the demands of favor, and the needs of individuals.The new President will need a group of like-minded specialists to satisfy the demands of current administration and future policy changes, the needs and expectations of party enthusiasts and special interests who have invested so much of their time and resources in his election, and those who burned themselves out at various posts while trying to keep his predecessor in office.  The shakeup in the White House is so chaotic that it is almost impossible to satisfy basic security concerns while the transformation is taking place.

 

Given this situation, the replacements of administrative personnel are usually seen as normal and most predictable.  Consequently, when Dr. Alexander H. Flax resigned as director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in March 1969, it was hardly even mentioned, much less raising any eyebrows.  Flax had been director for 3 ½ years demanding years – ones in which the NRO finally completed the objective of the Apollo program of sending men to the moon, and safely returning them to earth just before Christmas 1968 – just when the new Nixon administration has organizing itself to take power the next month. The public would hardly have been surprised if Flax took advantage of the Pentagon’s revolving door relationship with its industrial complex, and opted for a cushy position in the private sector.  

 

From the very outset when Richard Nixon was elected President in November 1968, though, his administration was ideally suited to take advantage of all the capabilities of the NRO. ‘Tricky Dick’ seemed just the man to want the services of an agency officially unknown, and whose abilities were only really known by a most small circle. It was not until five years later – in the middle of the Watergate scandal – that the media finally discovered its very existence, and it took another generation before officialdom – when it wanted to clean up its image – formally acknowledged its existence. The Nixon administration appeared to offer opportunities that Flax could hardly afford to turn down despite its stated intentions of ending America’s war in Vietnam.

 

And Flax did not offer his resignation, only to learn almost immediately that it was dejá vue all over again. Instead of using the NRO to help achieve peace – what the voters expected from Nixon since the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, had promised to continue LBJ’s campaign there to a successful conclusion – the Republican administration, thanks to input by the new National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and his military assistant, Colonel Alexander Haig, opted to snatch victory from defeat by launching a massive aerial bombardment of the whole area to destroy the ability of the North Vietnamese and their alleged surrogates, the Viet-Cong, to continue fighting.

 

Of course, they have maintained most false claims about what was afoot, once the gambit ended in total failure.  Kissinger wrote in 1979: “The Nixon Administration entered office determined to end our involvement in Vietnam.” (Quoted from Robert J. McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, p. 425.)  According to Kissinger, the reason why it didn’t do so successfully was because the American public and Washington’s commitments further afield did not permit the time and effort that General de Gaulle had been allowed to withdraw from Algeria. Haig, in Inner Circles, played dumb about the whole matter, acting as if he were merely a White House errand boy who prepared the President’s daily intelligence briefing, merely alluding to a paper he prepared for the President which Kissinger was enthusiastic about, and Nixon “…ordered us to put it into effect.” (p. 196)

 

Nixon’s first chief of staff, in his amended, published The Haldeman Diaries, described a most secret meeting held in Brussels during Nixon’s first visit to Europe on February 24, 1969:  “At the meeting K, his deputy, Al Haig, and a Pentagon planning officer worked out guidelines for a proposed plan for bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia.  P had decided on the plane to Belgium to order the bombing as a response to the North Vietnamese countrywide offensive that they launched the day before we left.” (p. 33)  The plan included the items that Haig and Lt. Col. Dewitt Smith had recommended to Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson five years earlier, but had been rejected at the time because they were too risky. (See Haig, pp. 137-9.)

 

While implementing the plan was postponed for three weeks in order to override State Department opposition, Operation Breakfast – the codename apparently befitting Haig’s morning intelligence duties – was kicked off on March 16th, a Sunday, after a dutiful church service.  Two days later, Haldeman reported, “K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ a great success.  He came beaming in with a report, very productive.  A lot more secondaries than had been expected.  Confirmed early intelligence.  Probably no reaction for a few days, if ever.” (p. 41)  The next phase of the secret war, Operation Lunch, the military incursion into Cambodia, followed in due course, but one would never know from reading Haig’s account.

 

Of course, Haldeman was referring to a North Vietnamese reaction, but there had already been a response.  Flax tendered his resignation just then, knowing that the Nixon administration had the tiger again by the tail, and he wanted no longer to be a part of it.  Haldeman, along with other administration leaders, also did not anticipate the increasingly hostile press coverage of the accelerating operation, thanks to leaks to the media about it.  Soon the Washington Post and New York Times reporters, especially William Beecher, were barred from the White House, and Haig, who was now regularly consulting with Nixon in the Old Executive Office Building where they both had offices, was busily involved in determining their source.

 

To implement the secret Kissinger-Haig plan, the White House created a “backchannel” with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thereby circumventing not only SOD Melvin Laird, Secretary of State William Rogers, and the Cabinet but also NSA and the CIA.  “Using special codes, teletypes, and secure terminals located at the Pentagon and in the White House Situation Room,”  Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin wrote in Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, “the president and his national security adviser could send and receive messages to selected American officials and members of foreign governments around the world without alerting the rest of the United States government.” (p. 8)

 

Of course, the secret war needed the NRO to collect the aerial intelligence, and to provide the necessary communications for the successful completion of what the agenda called for – disrupting the transmission of men and materiel along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the ousting of the North Vietnamese from their Cambodian sanctuary, pursuing those who fled into Laos, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, etc. – and a second set of false reports about results in order to keep others in the dark about what was going on.  Haig, in characteristic style, explained the campaign as the result of the North Koreans shooting down a US Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane on April 14th (p. 204ff.), a month after the bombing of Cambodia had started.   

 

For all intents and purposes, Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson – the top assistant to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer – the CNO who would soon become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – was the NRO’s deputy director under the new arrangements.  While Robinson was said to be running, later along with Yeoman Chuck Radford, a liaison office, connecting the JCS with the NSC – he was actually seeing to the implementation of what had been agreed to by Kissinger and Haig regarding the secret war.  Robinson may well have been the Pentagon planner present at Brussels at its inception.  The Admiral was a go-for-broke type who would stop at nothing to win the war in Vietnam      

 

As Admiral Robert O.Welander – Robinson’s replacement to the White House when the operation had to be closed down – explained to John D. Ehrlichman, the President’s Assistant on Domestic Affairs, and David R. Young, an aide to Kissinger, on December 23, 1971, his joint-position had existed for about ten years, and he took over from Admiral Robert Ginsburg who had held the position in the LBJ administration:  “I’m a two-way avenue of communications. I try and explain things to the (NSC) staff.  I mean some of the formal military positions, things of that sort.  I’m an in-house military expert; if they need some things done quickly.  I can go ahead and punch into the organization over there much more quickly and hopefully effectively, than if we go down through the formal mechanism.”

 (Quoted from Colodny and Gettlin, p. 447.) 

  

While Robinson was responding to NSC commands with NRO missions, Haig was increasingly trying to determine the source of the growing number of leaks, especially because his former boss, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had commissioned a study of why policy-making had gone so badly in Vietnam – a work Haig had been asked to join but had declined, unlike many former colleagues in the process, especially Daniel Ellsberg.  When the FBI finally declined to investigate more suspected leakers after having bugged 17 persons, most of them members of the NSC, over an 18-month period without any positive results, Haig saw to the hiring of The Plumbers aka Special Investigations Unit, and their installation in the Executive Office Building to continue the work

 

The Plumbers’ background has never been adequately examined, and the reason seems to be Harvey’s leadership of it. It was the descendant of his old ZR/RIFLE group in the Agency’s Division D which had expanded its “black bag” experts to plant bugs and photograph documents in foreign embassies into official assassination efforts (James Bamford, Body of Secrets, p. 479) – the authority that Harvey, now aka Harvey Lowmeyer, had used is getting rid of MLK and RFK.  Fred Emery, in Watergate, made no attempt to explain the group’s origin, just the decision by the Nixon White House to hire it to do its “black bag” operation. (p. 53ff.)  The CIA’s approval of the switch seems to have been made by DCI Richard Helms who was trying to separate Nixon’s covert operations from the Agency’s one, and slimming down its ranks to get rid of its most dangerous operators, especially Harvey, E. Howard Hunt, G, Gordon Liddy, and James McCord.

 

The troubles with the Kissinger-Haig-NRO secret war were manifold.  The North Vietnamese and the Viet-Cong were unwilling to negotiate anything more than the cessation of hostilities, and the withdrawal of American forces, as their unwillingness to let the Soviets negotiate some kind of lesser settlement indicated. Washington only added to these problems by opening the door to Red China, and talking to Moscow about a treaty to limit nuclear weapons, thinking falsely that these efforts would undermine their assistance of the Vietnamese.  And American losses continued to mount, as the media indicated – the NYT even publishing the photographs of service men killed since the Nixon administration had taken office.  Then NSA Kissinger was growing increasingly pessimistic about what the secret war was achieving.

 

These developments, especially the negotiations with the communist powers, drove the JCS to start using the “backchannel” to spy on what Kissinger and Haig were up to, especially as the secret war wound down. Admiral Welander and Yeoman Radford instead of being conduits to the NRO became spies for Admiral Moorer, chairman of the JCS.  “Military officers sensed that they were merely being used as instruments,” Colodny and Gettlin wrote, “to further Nixon’s own ends; their belief that this was the case was furthered by the events of ensuing months, during which they saw themselves being ignored, cut out, and circumvented on all the important issues – the conduct of the war, troop withdrawals, the peace negotiation, and SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty), just to name the most important ones.” (p. 10)

 

This spying – which started for real in October 1970 –  was discussed by Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman at a meeting at the White House on December 21, 1971 where they interviewed Welander’s assistant, as James Rosen recounted in “Nixon and the Chiefs,” on KeepMedia on April 1, 2002:  ” ‘Under the implied approval of his supervisor,’ Ehrlichman said at another point in the conversation, Radford ‘has systematically stolen documents out of Henry’s briefcase, Haig’s briefcase, people’s desks – anyplace and every place in the NSC apparatus, that he could get his hands on – and then duplicated them and turned them over to the Joint Chiefs, through his boss’.”  While the President was interested in seeking a prosecution of those thought responsible, especially Haig, the Attorney General talked him out of doing so for fear of disastrous blowback.

 

Instead, the liaison office was immediately closed, and the files Welander had were handed over to Haig who understandably handed those relating to the spying to Ehrlichman while keeping the rest himself. Welander was transferred to a sea command as far away from Washington as could be found, and Radford was reassigned to Oregon’s Naval Reserve Training Center.  Admiral Robinson, while revealing nothing about his being a NRO conduit during the secret war when he was interviewed, was conveniently killed in a helicopter crash in the Tonkin Gulf in May 1972, leaving Haig in the confident position of denying in an uncharacteristic footnote Silent Coup‘s claims only about him:  “…I do so now by stating categorically that any suggestion that this officer committed any act of disloyalty whatsoever to the United States or his Commander-in-Chief while serving in the White House is totally false.” (p. 245)

 

Officially, during this time, the NRO was busily occupied positioning its new generation of satellites, Rhyolites, constructed in TRW’s M-4 facility in Redondo Beach, California, and making arrangements around the globe for the secure retrieval of their take.  The satellites – the size of a minibus, and equipped with a solar-powered, dish-shaped antenna aimed towards the earth – were designed to pick up microwave and satellite communications on a continual basis – what the Soviets were increasingly relying upon in communicating across their vast country – and down-loading what they recorded without any encryption to avoid any additional weight in securing their positioning in space. In order for the satellites to work continuously, they had to be placed in geosynchronous orbit – 22,380 miles above the equator, and at a longitude where a secure place existed below.

 

Flax’s replacement, Dr. John L. McLucas, was the ideal director for the job, as he had spent his previous, relevant career in the private sector, and, cconsequently, knew nothing about the NRO’s ongoing operations, especially its secret war in Southeast Asia.  McLucas, the former CEO and President of MITRE Corp., had been involved in developing communication systems for national air security, and McLucas, in becoming Air Force undersecretary too, just thought

his function was to smooth relations between the public and private providers of satellites, as he explained to researchers for the Defense Acquisition History Project shortly before he died:  “So I saw it as mainly dealing with hardware and with the people who were necessary to procure and upgrade the hardware.”

 

McLucas left the positioning of the new satellites to subordinates, and their real challenge was to find a place where they could conveniently and securely download their take in the far Pacific. Australia offered the best sites possible, and as long as it was governed by politicians friendly to America’s venture in Vietnam, it was no problem. The site selected was at Pine Gap, near Ayers Rock, smack-dab in the middle of the continent.  “Like a vacuum cleaner,” Helen Caldicott wrote in Missile Envy, “they suck up a wide spectrum of Soviet and Chinese military communications and radar emissions and beam them back to Pine Gap.” (p. 127)  Pine Gap also received photographs and electronic transmissions from the latest satellites in the KH series, KH-8, and 9 (BIG BIRD).

 

For the purposes of this article, though, the most relevant program at Pine Gap was the CIA’s Pyramider project, about which Dr. Caldicott wrote:  “It communicated with foreign agents using sensing mechanisms placed in strategic locations around the world, and backup communications for overseas systems.  The Pyramider program was supposed to ensure ‘maximum undetectability’.” (ibid.)  Pyramider was part of the program that DCI Helms was using to ferret out alleged spies among the anti-war ranks worldwide, and to pave the way for the secret operations by rogue agent William King Harvey et al. Of course, no system ensures undetectability, especially if someone in it decides to talk. What, for example, would have been the protection against Dr. Flax himself telling tales – and well he might, given his unexpected, abrupt resignation – and who really were the leakers that Colonel Haig was now so worried about?

 

To complement what was going on at Pine Gap, DCI Helms created the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO).  The joint CIA-Navy project was organized much like the NRO, with the Navy taking the place of the Air Force, and its management being directed in the Agency’s direction.  The impetus behind the NURO’s creation was the Navy’s attack sub Halibut finding a stricken Soviet Golf attack submarine on the Pacific Ocean floor – loaded with nuclear weapons, “crypto-codes”, and its communication systems – and the CIA was going all-out to build a vessel to retrieve it. 

 

In 1970, the Halibut was given the assignment to tap the Soviet cable in the Sea of Okhotsk to its port on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Petropavlovsk.  To facilitate such operations, the Navy built three stations to transmit very-low-frequency (VLF) messages to the probing subs: the biggest one on the Northwest Cape of Western Australia, a second one at Jim Creek, Washington, and a third at Cutler, Maine. 

 

To insure the security of the new NURO’s operations, its CIA-led leadership carried out Operation Kittyhawk – a disinformation one to persuade Moscow falsely that it had SIGINT operations by the Americans under control.  In June 1966, KGB agent Igor Kochnov made himself available to the Agency as a continuing agent in place by offering his services to CI chief James Angleton over the phone.  To help settle disputes, and coordinate operations between the Bureau and the Agency, he was recruited, and allowed to handle a Soviet defector, former Red Banner fleet officer Nicholas Shadrin aka Nikolai Artamonov codenamed LARK, who was working for the Office of Naval Intelligence. 

 

While Shadrin helped settle their disputes over another defector, Yuri Nosenko, Mark Riebling wrote in Wedge, “Shadrin also began to pass doctored naval secrets to the Soviets.” (p. 232)  The kind of doctored information he was supplying was the difficulty the Halibut was having in finding the cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, the worries the Americans had about her being discovered in Soviet waters, the infrared guidance system that Soviet cruise missiles had which were so threatening to American carriers, etc.   (For just how hopeless The Sword and The Shield:  The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB is as a source, note that Mitrokhim has no information about Kochnov, and Shadrin ‘s contribution is limited to his false claim that he could discover Nosenko’s whereabouts! (p. 387)

 

As with the NRO’s secrets about SIGINT operations during the Vietnam war, NURO’s secret operations against Soviet SIGINT were betrayed in late 1967 by Chief Warrant Officer John Walker, a communications watch officer on the staff of the commander of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarines who walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington to offer his services shortly after fellow spy Robert Lipka had left NSA.  “He had access to reports on submarine operations, technical manuals, and daily key lists,” Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew wrote in Blind Man’s Bluff, “that were used to unscramble all the messages sent through  the military’s most widely used coding machines.” (p. 351)  As expected, the Mitrokin Archive has nothing to say about what the eighteen years of spying by him, his recruit Jerry Whitworth, and three members of his family contributed to Soviet security.

 

The success of the Walker spy ring was well demonstrated when the Halibut finally went on its first NURO mission to tap the cable in the Sea of Okhotsk in October 1971 just when the SALT talks with Moscow were entering their most difficult stages. The Soviets knew that the submarine would be looking for a sign along the coast somewhere, warning mariners not to anchor because a cable lay underneath – what  Captain James Bradley, the Navy’s top underwater spy, was convinced existed because of his experience on ships as a youth on the Mississippi. 

 

After more than a week’s search, lo and behold, the Halibut discovered a sign, stating in Russian:  “Do Not Anchor. Cable Here.”  In placing the tap on the cable – what enabled Washington periodically to read the routine communications between Moscow and its submarines in the Pacific – submariners discovered a mass of destroyed cruise missiles, small pieces of which they carefully recovered in the hope of coming up with a complete homing device of the cruise missiles.  While the Navy’s Department of Energy lab reconstructed a missile, its engineers were never able to put together the homing device.  In sum, despite the NURO’s massive efforts, it really never came up with anything important because of the spying by the Walkers.  

  

When Nixon was nearing the end of his life, former DCI Helms told Cambridge history Christopher Andrew in an interview in April 1992 his side of the story in dealing with the former President’s White House.  (See his For the President’s Eyes Only, p. 350ff., and notes.)  Of course, Helms wanted readers to believe that Nixon was the guiding hand behind Operation Chaos, claiming that the only way the Agency could prove to the President that domestic dissent was not inspired by foreign communist powers was by investigating all anti-war persons, and all contacts they had had with any foreign person.  In putting all the onus of the program on the President, though, Helms never expressed any real opposition to it nor threatened to resign because it was completely swamping his agency.

 

Then Helms was worried about the legacy Harvey had left in immobilizing other agencies while he had carried out the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.  Agents of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) had repeatedly had their drug-trafficking investigations, particularly those of James Earl Ray and his courier Charlie Stein, stopped because of NRO wiretapping which showed that CIA agents were involved.  These concerns became a crisis when Nixon ordered on June 5, 1970 Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, NSA’s director, “…to program for coverage the communications of U. S. citizens using international facilities.”  (“James Bamford Statement on NSA Surveillance,” February 3, 2006, cryptome.org)  Same as now, NSA needed neither a warrant nor probably cause for the wire-tapping in Operation Minaret.

 

This presidential directive set off alarm bells at CIA, and it moved immediately to limit any damage from new wire-tapping, especially those of sources working with the BNDD. Of course, the Agency and Bureau both had been supportive of the program when it was started back in 1967 – only to be closed down a month later when the FBI was unable to find any connection between the Vietnam Veterans against the War and the Communist Party – only to be resumed in 1968 after MLK and RFK had conveniently departed the political scene.  The CIA was worried about investigators learning about the hiatus and wondering why, especially since February 1970 when Director Hoover broke off all contact with Langley – what would show that the Agency was using the BNDD as a cover for Harvey activities, and a firewall against dangerous blowback.

 

Two weeks after Nixon had ordered warrantless eavesdropping on foreign communications of Americans by NSA, BNDD agents carried out the biggest drug-bust in history – Operation Eagle during which 150 suspects were rounded up from cities around the country.  “As many as 70 percent of those arrested had once belonged to the Bay of Pigs invasion force,” Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall wrote in Cocaine Politics, “unleashed by the CIA against Cuba in April 1961.” (p. 26)  The others were connected to the Mafia, especially the crime families of Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Sam ‘Momo’ Giancana.  Of course, their arrests, prosecutions and imprisonment not only took them out of circulation but also rendered their terrorist activities for the Agency a dead letter.  

 

Of particular concern to Langley was the activities of the Florida-based financial conglomerate, the World Finance Corporation (WFC).  Headed by Guillermo Hernández Cartaya, a member of the Operation 40 group which planned to take over Cuba in the wake of Castro’s demise, the WFC was riddled with CIA agents, noticeably Juan Restoy, Ricardo Morales, and Mario Escandar, and Agency fronts.  The arrests and indictments were an effective diversion from what were their primary responsibilities – murders, decoy operations, terrorist bombings and underworld enforcement – and after the crisis had passed, they largely escaped prison on legal technicalities. Of course, the CIA leader of all these anti-Castro Cubans was E. Howard Hunt, the eccentric writer who was now an employee of the Mullen Company, and back then thought that domestic dissent in Cuba, triggered into action by a small invasion force, could easily lead to his ouster. 

 

The arrest of some Agency assets and the transfer of others had been just in time as the disarray of Washington’s intelligence services had reached a new low in cooperation.  At the same time that Nixon ordered the warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA, it seemed that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DIA had agreed to a new level of cooperation in meeting the unprecedented domestic unrest by agreeing to the Huston Plan – what the President’s liaison with the agencies Tom Charles Huston had proposed – but Director Hoover refused to go along with the program which would leave him responsible for any illegal activities, and broke off not only all liaison with them but also with the Secret Service, the IRS, and the individual armed services intelligence services.  “By cutting off liaison,” Curt Gentry wrote in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, “Hoover hoped to distance the FBI, and his own reputation, from the inevitable holocaust.” (p. 655)

 

Hardly a week later, the fat was in the fire when the New York Times announced that the Pentagon study of the conduct of the Vietnam war had been leaked to the press. While Nixon first thought that it would be a boon to his re-election since it showed the double-dealing of JFK and LBJ, he soon changed his mind when State Department memoranda showed the deep involvement of Henry Cabot Lodge and the Agency’s Lt. Col. Lucien Conein in Diem’s overthrow.  Then the effort to get leaker Daniel Ellsberg by criminal due process was completely frustrated by the FBI taps that had been ordered to discover the leaker of the Nixon-Kissinger-Haig secret war –  the DOJ could not use them without showing that they had earlier been trying to get his friends, especially Morton Halperin.

 

Charles Colson, Nixon’s special counsel, was ultimately obliged to have the Plumbers break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding who had refused to tell the Bureau the findings of his examination of his patient, hoping to find the information themselves – setting off a process which dragged into White House operations just those people the Agency was trying to distance itself from.  Hunt.- thought to have been the “mastermind” of the Bay of Pigs Operation – turned out to be the leader of Cartaya’s group, the people who had just been arrested by the BNDD.  More important, Hunt promised to provide “the right resources”, as Fred Emery explained in Watergate, to turn Ellsberg’s betrayal into a political triumph.  Then Hunt was consulting with Conein, another operative involved, along with Ted Shackley, and was working for Harvey on how to make it look as if JFK had been more involved in Diem’s overthrow that thought.

 

From the NRO’s point of view, the most damaging aspect of the Plumbers’ work was Hunt’s forging cables to prove the Kennedys had personally conspired in the assassination of South Vietnam’s President Diem – what President Nixon not only demanded, but deliberately referred to in his September 16th news conference, taking the initiative way from opponents using the release of The Pentagon Papers against the administration. 

 

Thanks to input from Conein, and help from Plumber secretary Kathleen Chenow, Hunt was able to put together forged cables – the Gemstone Papers – which falsely claimed that the US Embassy had asked for instructions about possible asylum for Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, if they were overthrown.  More important, as Fred Emery wrote in Watergate, a forged cable back to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon declared:  “At highest level meeting today decision reluctantly made that neither you nor General Harkins should intervene in behalf of Diem or Nhu in event they seek asylum.” (Quoted from p. 72.)

 

While Hunt was unable to publish an article, based upon his forgeries, in the last issue of Life magazine, Conein took advantage of them when he appeared in December on the NBC-TV program “White Paper: Vietnam HIndsight” – what led NYT reporter Neil Sheehan, who had leaked The Pentagon Papers, to connect Daniel Ellsberg to the break-in, and to conclude that Conein’s statements left no doubt about the extent of the Kennedy administration’s involvement in the assassination of the South Vietnamese leaders.  And there was no denial from any former JFK officials or former Ambassador Lodge about having either said or seen any of the material claimed, and neither the NSA nor the NRO have raised any questions or complaints since about their alleged existence.

 

Little wonder that when the Agency learned early in 1972 that disgruntled agent Victor Marchetti, a former assistant to the DDCI who regularly attended planning and intelligence meetings attended by DCI Helms, was writing an article and a book about the Agency’s corruption, independence and incompetence in conducting foreign operations, its leadership pushed the panic button to stop them.  After having stolen the material from the office of a New York publisher, and placed Marchetti under surveillance, the Agency went successfully to court to get an injunction against the book’s publication, claiming that he was bound to secrecy, and obliging him to permit prepublication censorship before it appeared. 

 

After a series of court hearings about what had to be removed, and two years later, the book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, finally appeared, with only the Agency’s claim to secrecy for 27 items regarding SIGINT satellite intelligence, as Angus Mackenzie concluded in Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home, standing up in court.  The NRO’s work was still the Republic’s deepest secrets.          

 

 

 

 

A History of America’s National Reconnaissance Office – part 3

By Trowbridge H. Ford

The trouble with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) taking on heavy responsibilities in the covert war in Vietnam, and trying to shore up support domestically for its continuance is that it had the most shadowy existence and legitimacy which were highly likely to be exposed as the operations involved so many personnel, and caused so much damage, both physically and psychologically.  Operation Phoenix was an intense effort to break the political will of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese – what had started with Operation Plan 34A in February 1964 in the North – throughout the area by targeting their leadership, while NRO intercepts of communications with Cuba were intended to reveal how  Americans were using enemy funds, especially from Hanoi, to undermine the nation’s will in the war.

 

The shaky basis upon which the NRO was operating on was well demonstrated when the Pentagon finally released the Department of Defense Directive upon which it was based – a mere updating of a most short 1962 one on March 17, 1964 – what was a consequence of National Security Action Memorandum 288, issued the same day, and was intended to carry out the recommendations of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had just come back from Vietnam, a day earlier.  They were all seen as necessary steps of a last-ditch effort to prevent all of Southeast Asia from falling to the communists.

 

It was McNamara who recommended retaliatory actions against North Vietnam – overt high and/or low-level reconnaissance flights to locate the Viet Cong’s sources of supply, the bombing of strategic targets, commando raids on installations of tactical importance, and the mining of North Vietnamese ports – in order to insure South Vietnam’s independence.  “That objective, while being cast in terms of eliminating North Vietnamese control and direction of the insurgency, would in practical terms be directed toward collapsing the morale and self-assurance of the Viet Cong cadres now operating in South Vietnam and bolstering the morale of the Khanh regime.”  (Quoted from The Pentagon Papers, paperback ed., p. 280.)  

 

To facilitate the implementation of these recommendations, the NSAM 288 was agreed to, and the DoD Directive issued. The Directive’s legality was based upon provisions regarding maintaining the security of the CIA in the 1947 National Security Act, and as amended by the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958.  The Top Secret document did little more than recognize the NRO’s existence, and the duty of its director to coordinate and consolidate all the government’s satellite operations into one program, and to perform some other function whose nature was blackened out by the censor’s pen when it was declassified but whose content must have been about aerial reconnaissance necessary for McNamara’s plans. 

 

This assumption is furthered by the fact that the agencies the NRO was to work with – apparently NSA, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities headed by Major General Rollen Anthis, the Military Assistance Command in Saigon, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies – were somehow missing when the document was released. The administration firmly believed that the Viet Cong was controlled and directed from Hanoi, and once its infrastructure and will was broken, the insurgency in the South would collapse.

 

Three years of Rolling Thunder air attacks in the North while increasing American ground troops in the South to protect the most fragile government in Saigon proved these assumptions unfounded – as the Tet offensive of February 1968 proved – and leading hawks in Washington, starting with SOD McNamara, began reassessing their positions, and leaving the government when their revised views went unheeded.  The still committed hawks would not tolerate any idea of settling for anything but victory, and they secretly worked behind the scenes to extend covert operations throughout the whole area because of the shortage of troops to launch a conventional offensive in the hope of breaking the infrastructure and will of the Viet Cong itself – Operation Phoenix.

 

The Operation has often been confused with other kinds of military actions – SWIFT boat patrols which encountered resistance, the results of ‘search and destroy’ campaigns by organized military forces, patrols which ended in wild firefights, and the like. The confusion regarding naval patrols was well demonstrated when former SWIFT boat sailors challenged Senator John F. Kerry when he charged during the 2004 presidential campaign that they had engaged in war crimes – what Kerry could not substantiate.  The same confusion surrounds the My Lai massacre in 1968 when Lt. William Calley’s platoon was caught shooting up a village while in pursuit of a Viet Cong force – what helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who died during the campaign too, stopped at gun point, and ferried the survivors to safety.

 

Operation Phoenix is usually sanitized into merely an overly aggressive search for intelligence about insurgents where torture was even resorted to.  William Blum, citing David Wise’s article “Colby of the CIA – CIA of Colby” in a 1973 issue of The New York Times Magazine, wrote this in Rogue State:  “The notorious Operation Phoenix, set up by the CIA to wipe out the Viet Cong infrastructure, subjected suspects to torture such as electric shock to the genitals of both men and women, and the insertion into the ear of a six-inch dowel, which was tapped through the brain until the victim died; suspects were also thrown out of airborne helicopters to persuade the more important suspects to talk, although this should probably be categorized as murder of the ones thrown out, and a form of torture for those not.” (p. 52)

 

Actually, Operation Phoenix was a most sophisticated system of terror where violations of  international law often took place: aassaults, ambushes and assassinations, generally at night, regularly occurred; renditions of those surviving routinely followed to places where comprehensive torture was carried out until the suspects were considered spent; and then they were simply executed.  Aerial intelligence by the NRO was absolutely essential in all its operations as it was only after it had been taken, collected and analyzed could covert operators decide what targets to assault, and how. The instrument used was increasingly satellites as their passage overhead of any possible target would not tip-off the inhabitants of what was possibly afoot.  Operation Phoenix, in short, was the ultimate when it came to death squads.

 

If anyone is still in any doubt about the brutality of Operation Phoenix, he should consider the people who really ran it, and the evaluations by competent judges of its character.  British covert operators, especially those in the dreaded SAS, considered American special forces, especially the Green Berets and Navy Seals, unnecessarily vicious in carrying out their missions. For example, Ken Connor, in Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS, noted that they did not live and learn from the people they were trying to pacify, preferring to “get them by the balls”  when it came to winning their hearts and minds.  “The American inability – or refusal – to distinguish between combatants and civilians led,” he concluded, “to the brutal treatment of whole sectors of the population…” (p. 145)

 

This result was hardly unexpected since the CIA operative conducting Phoenix was Ted  ‘Blond Ghost’ Shackley who had been William King Harvey’s boss in Berlin during the tunnel operation in the 1950s, and in Miami during the Missile Crisis before he became station chief in Vientiane, Laos. It was while leading a guerrilla force of 20,000 Hmong tribesmen against the Pathet Lao, allies of the North Vietnamese, that he built up the skills considered necessary for running the operation, and he spared no option in terror when making up for not having stopped communism during the Missile Crisis.  Shackley was successful enough in his efforts to become Saigon station chief after the containment of the Tet offensive in 1968.

 

The only trouble in using such an operation in saving the war in Vietnam was that it might be completely upset in Washington by the election of a peace platform, headed by a different President. In that case, everything would be for naught, so Phoenix’s domestic side, headed by Harvey in New Orleans, prepared for the worst. He aka William Wood and Bill Boxley had been in a tailspin ever since the Dallas cock-up, and had been activated by DDCI Helms to make sure that Jim Garrison’s hunt for JFK’s killers did not get anywhere.  Of course, Harvey, the massive, pistol-packing operator, had all the right connections with the Agency’s Science and Technology Division, the Mafia, especially Sam Giancana’s and Carlos Marcello’s people, and hardliners in Hoover’s FBI. 

 

Hardly had Senator Robert Kennedy declared that the war was unwinnable, and Martin Luther King organized his Poor People’s Campaign, highlighted by a march on Washington to protest LBJ’s failure to follow through on his 1964 Great Society promises – what helped lead the beleaguered President to announce a bombing halt in Vietnam, and that he would not seek re-election – than Harvey maneuvered a programmed James Earl Ray into position in Memphis to assassinate him. Then when Kennedy picked up the peace mantle, and as President would appoint an independent commission to investigate the plot which assassinated his brother, Harvey had Sirhan Sirhan programmed as a decoy in his murder while security guard Thane Cesar killed him after his crucial victory in the California primary. (For more on this, see my article in Issue Eight of Eye Spy magazine, “Manchurian Candidates: Mind-Control Experiments and The Deadliest Secrets of the Cold War,” pp. 50-55, and my articles* about Harvey, Helms, and Peter Wright in codshit.com’sTrowbridge Archive.)

 

Of course, Harvey’s tasks were to recruit people like Ray and Sirhan – persons with disassociated personalities which could be manipulated unconsciously by drugs and hypnosis – in ways which would involve no suspicions that the CIA was involved, to see that they were programmed to do what was required without any recall, and leave no tracks which could be retraced back to him and the Agency if the assassinations resulted in anything more than usual murder investigations. The essential responsibility was to get other agencies, especially the Secret Service, the FBI and other agencies – with input from the NRO – involved in ways which would keep Harvey and his colleagues informed of how affairs were developing, and at the same time providing a firewall against any blowback if plans went awry again, or serious concerns were raised about these assassinations. 

 

Given MLK’s campaign against Giancana’s exploitation of blacks in Chicago, it was easy for Momo’s lieutenant Johnny Rosselli to recruit Ray after he escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, and made his way slowly with Raoul apparently aka Jules Ricco Kimble to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico as a Momo bagman.  In doing so, he alerted Mexican federal police that he might be involved in drug-trafficking, but they made no attempt to arrest the fugitive – indicating that he was under surveillance in a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) sting. In the resort, Ray was re-directed back to LA by Giancana’s people where he was checked out by Agency consultant Dr. Mark O. Freeman as to his suitability in being made a programmed assassin.

 

Then Ray was taken by Charles Stein, a criminal well-connected to Marcello, and a former resident of New Orleans, where he was checked out by Harvey for the MLK job after the operator had provided a complete cover up of the meeting as David E. Scheim indicated in Contract America:  “According to the House Assassinations Committee, Ray took the ‘possibly sinister’ trip with a specific important objective, accomplished it rapidly, met with someone in New Orleans and received money on the trip.” (p. 317) 

 

While the HAC would have us believe that Ray met some subordinates of Marcello in the Provincial Hotel to arrange MLK’s killing – what it was unable to find any evidence of – he actually met Harvey in his safe house where he was okayed for the operation.  This was proven when he got back to LA, and Rev. Xavier von Koss hypnotized him to kill King under certain specific circumstances, and subjected him to a program of psychic driving to help induce it. (For a completely false explanation of the meeting – one which provides all kinds of evidence to refute its own conclusion, see Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 208ff.)

 

While this article is not a detailed explanation of either the MLK or the RFK assassination, I think that what I have written so far indicates why the FBI, BNDD, and Secret Service – and ultimately the NRO – got involved in monitoring the activities of both Ray and Sirhan. He had similar connections with the Mafia, problems with the authorities in New York and Miami because of the criminal activities by his boss Frank Donneroummas aka Henry Ramistella, and experience with drugs and hypnotists in LA too – what is grounds for thinking Harvey made him into a Manchurian candidate because of his hatred of RFK, and what he apparently did to MLK. 

 

Stein’s driving Ray to New Orelans would obviously get the BNDD involved, as he was reputedly selling narcotics in the city at the time.  Ray’s own escape from the American and Mexican authorities while on the run indicates quite clearly that they were hunting bigger game, especially Marcello.  And the Secret Service, after the fiasco in Dallas, was almost paranoid about the same thing happening to LBJ – what would make it most concerned about how the activities of Cubans, pro and con Fidel, fitted into all this.

 

And Sirhan was programmed behind a similar smokescreen.  Instead of a Mafioso like Marcello seeing, it seems, to his hiring, it was a Southern California rancher who put out a contract on Kennedy because of his support of Cesar Chavez’s farm workers, and someone overheard a subordinate of Jimmy Hoffa’s, apparently Carmine Galente, in the Lewisburg (Pa.) federal penitentiary discussing his execution in a way reminiscent to how Ray was hired and sprung by Giancana’s people to get MLK while in the Missouri one. 

 

RFK, considered America’s worst turncoat by its covert leadership, suspected that Hoffa was behind his brother’s assassination, and had had an aide recklessly inform Jim Garrison of his suspicions!  This obviously became most dangerous to RFK, increasingly seen as the next President, when Harvey infiltrated the investigation, and kept the Agency informed about developments in New Orleans, as Vincent Salandria, one of the few respectable critics of the Warren Report who claimed that the JFK assassination was the result of a government conspiracy, belatedly informed the District Attorney:  “Jim, I’m afraid your friend, Bill Boxley, works for the federal government.”  (Quoted from Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 221.)

 

Sirhan suffered from compulsive gambling, constantly involved in shady deals to pay off the consequent debts. More important, Sirhan, being a Christian refugee from Palestine who could barely speak Arabic, emigrated to the States in 1956 after a terrifying childhood, and was often complaining about their plight to the folks back home, especially to his father who had returned causing security officials concerned about where his pan-Arabism may lead, especially after Nasser’s forces had been humiliated in the 1967 Six Day War. While he was compulsively writing and saying threats about RKF – part of his programming – officialdom apparently only thought that they pertained to LBJ since the President was responsible for the help to Israel that so angered Sirhan.

 

The growing connection between what was going on in Vietnam with developments back home was enhanced by things which had nothing to do with the assassinations of MLK and RFK – just information leaking out which could cause people to make the association.  In the June 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine, Stanley Sheinbaum, who had been the coordinator of a Michigan State University project to assist the economic development of South Vietnam, provided an exposé of how the CIA had manipulated the program to serve its covert agenda, and threatened to expose more Agency interference in domestic organizations.

 

In investigating the magazine, hoping to find communist infiltration of the organization, the CIA discovered that its most outspoken author was former Green Beret Donald Duncan – whose book The New Legions, condemning the training and operations of his former colleagues, caused some of them and many citizens to gain a new political consciousness – who only promised more.  “We will continue to be in danger,” he wrote to DCI Helms, “as long as the CIA is deciding policy and manipulating nations.” (Quoted from Angus MacKenzie, Secrets, p. 17.)

 

It was Ramparts which even got Dr. King concerned about the plight of the Vietnamese, his close associate, and later public defender William F. Pepper writing an article, entitled “The Children of Vietnam,” in the January 1967 issue about the US Army’s brutal treatment of their offspring.  As Pepper wrote recently in An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, it was his files that induced King “…not only to formally announce his opposition to that war but to actively work and organize against it in every corner of America he visited.” (p. 5)

 

It was in this context that the NRO was brought into the hunt for the communists, traitors, and drug lords by the BNDD, the Secret Service, and the FBI who were thought to be undermining the national will in Vietnam.  As NSA director Lt. Gen. Lew Allen testified in 1975 before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities aka Church Committee, in 1967 the United States Intelligence Board tasked it to intercept all communications that Americans had overseas regarding drug trafficking, Executive protection, and foreign influence over US groups.  In the six-year period the program was working, the NRO supplied 2,000 reports regarding drug trafficking, and 1,900 ones regarding possible terrorism and foreign manipulation of domestic political activity.

 

While James Bamford has portrayed the program in Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World as a rogue one, conceived by its paranoid deputy director Louis Tordella, which was essentially concerned with making watch lists of subversives (p. 428ff), it was authorized by the White House, and it concerned primarily what people were saying and doing about all these things. While Bamford was most concerned with what the CIA, Bureau, and the DIA were doing about the reported activities of people like MLK, Dr. Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda, and singer Joan Baez, he made no mention of the BNDD, and what its requested intercepts involved – what led to all kinds disinformation which Harvey and his agents took cruel advantage of in the assassinations of MLK and RFK.

 

Of course, by the time that Watergate occurred, and covert activities by the Nixon White House started leaking out, what the NRO had supplied to the process was ancient history, and by the time the NSA was obliged to testify about its role, what its reconnaissance agency had done seemed of little consequence.  When General Allen was obliged to testify before the Church Committee, he mentioned this without the slightest response from committee members.  “NSA did not retain any of the BNDD watch lists or product.  It was destroyed in the fall of 1973, since there seemed no purpose or requirement to retain it.” (For more, see Bamford, p. 428ff.)  Independent investigators might have had different ideas, once they saw how deeply involved the BNDD was in following all the activities of the leading Mafiosos, and anti-Castro Cubans – what had cleared the way for Harvey.

 

By then, NRO director Dr. Alexander Flax, its public face, had long departed the scene.  He retired with the arrival of the new Nixon administration back in March 1969.  Apollo 8, the Lunar Orbit and Return, had safely been completed just before Christmas, and with the election of a candidate allegedly committed to achieving peace in Vietnam, it was an ideal time to go.

 

 

*  http://codshit.blogspot.se/2004/01/mi5s-peter-wright-cold-wars-most.html

   http://codshit.blogspot.se/2004/01/william-king-harvey-cias-ultimate.html 

   http://codshit.blogspot.se/2004/02/richard-helms-contral-intelligence.html

 

A History of America’s National Reconnaissance Office – part 2

by Trowbridge H. Ford

While America’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) was busily occupied in designing and building rockets, spacecrafts, and the like for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s effort to beat the Soviets in putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s – President Kennedy’s lasting legacy – it was also continuing its own intelligence work, what was increasingly signal intelligence (SIGINT) from satellites.  By the time JFK was assassinated, Washington had successfully completed the Mercury Project, the program to have man successfully circumnavigate the globe, and recover not only the astronauts but also the space crafts – what required a half-dozen missions to effect. 

 

It had all started when the newly created NRO launched the 84-pound Discoverer XIV space satellite on August 18, 1960 from Vandenberg AFB in California – what was able to collect as much coverage as four years of U-2 flights – whose twenty-four pound rolls of film did, indeed, determine that the Soviets only had four operational ICBMs, ending for all reasonable purposes CIA’s paranoia about the “missile gap”. While officials at the NRO claim that the agency itself was created to perform this task, it was formed to prevent the collection of intelligence, especially that relating to the Soviets, from again being compromised and corrupted by the Agency’s HUMINT – what had happened with the ‘downing’ of Gary Powers’ U-2 over the USSR on May Day 1960.

 

Now the task for the NRO was to help land a man on the moon, and safely bring him back to earth (Apollo Project) – what NRO director Brockway McMillan was almost completely involved in.  Of course, the agency’s very existence was still Washington’s most closely guarded secret, so McMillan’s role was completely attributed to his being an Air Force undersecretary at the Pentagon.  It was in this capacity that the most cultured administrator functioned on its Planning Board – what determined which missions with NASA would occur, and whether they would have a military or civilian purpose – while leaving the NRO’s day-to-day functioning to gung-ho Brigadier General Jack Ledford, the director of special operations at Air Force Headquarters in Washington.

 

Ledford’s normal duties required things like collecting the take from Corona satellites, and seeing to the testing of more conventional intelligence aircraft, especially the A-12s and later the SR-71 (codenamed Oxcart).  These planes were intended to fly at yet greater altitudes and speeds – up to Mach 3 – to find early warning radars deep within the Soviet Union, and to avoid its ever-increasing air defenses.  It was while pilot Ken Collins was testing one variation of the A-12 over Area 51 in Nevada on May 24, 1963 that it went into a fatal spin, and crashed.  Though Collins managed to parachute to safety, the NRO and the Pentagon were so panicked that the public would find big bits of the plane, and determine a lot of what the agency was up to that director McMillan suggested that it be immediately found, and blown up to prevent discovery.

 

Actually, the remains of the plane were strewn all over Robin Hood’s barn, so there was no need of panic. Instead teams of searchers methodically retrieved every bit of the plane they could find, but the experience figured large when Ledford had to figure out what to do with Captain Glenn Hyde’s deadly revealing U-2 aircraft after the assassination of JFK turned sour when Texas Governor was also nearly murdered. 

 

While CIA’s Porter Goss was keeping a muzzle on the press from Key West’s Public Information Office, Ledford apparently ordered the destruction of the downed plane, lying on the bottom of the Florida Straits, after the hoax at the expense of Castro and Khrushchev had proven the last thing the plotters wanted.  The destruction of the damning evidence – what ended up with there only being “minor debris” left from the flight – seemed just what the most delicate crisis called for.  This way there would never be any damaging evidence to be recovered by anyone in future.

 

Still, Ledford’s problems with the Dallas foul-up were nowhere near finished.  Thanks to his connections inside the Pentagon, all the other services had been brought into the plot, and their role had to be diffused as quickly and as well as possible – especially Lee Harvey Oswald’s apparent role as somebody’s spy, and how the various military services were going to take advantage of the President’s assassination by attacking Cuba, and forcing a general confrontation with Moscow. 

 

As Major Al Haig, military assistant to Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance, partially described in Inner Circles, Defense Intelligence Agency claims that Oswald might well have been working for Cuba had to be destroyed (pp. 115-6), and Operation Americas, the Latin American armada to oust Castro, had to be changed into defensive maneuvers off Colombia’s north coast. CIA chief of counterintelligence James Angleton had to hush up claims from Mexico City that the KGB had recruited Oswald as an assassin when he visited there in September, and close down E. Howard Hunt’s Second Naval Guerrilla Operation’s plans to attack Cuba from Honduras. Ledford had to erase Oswald’s connections to its operations, and the military’s plans domestically to take advantage of what he had apparently done in Dallas.

 

The mere mention that Oswald had defected to the USSR in 1959, and that communist literature was found among his belongings after he was arrested foreclosed any real possibility of his being considered an American agent, and military intelligence kept mum about the cable sent by the Fourth Army Command in Texas on the evening after the assassination to the U.S. Strike Command, a joint army and air force attack unit, at McDill AFB in Florida that Oswald had defected to Cuba, and that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party – what was intended to trigger action.  Ledford, it seems, was the one who stopped the intended reaction.

 

Similarly, Oswald’s service in the Marines was made out to be decidedly below par, concentrating on his alleged performance with a rifle, instead of his being rather special.  After basic training, Oswald attended school to become a radar operator and an air traffic-controller.  He scored so well as an Aviation Electronics Operator – seventh out of a class of 30 – that he was assigned to Marine Air Control Squadron One at Atsugi AFB outside Tokyo, the home base of the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, and the illegal storage depot of America’s atomic weapons in the country. Oswald, according to Anthony Summers in The Kennedy Conspiracy, knew everything about what was going on there (p. 114ff.)  – what, it seems, led air force intelligence to recruit and train him as a deep penetration agent of the USSR.

 

At this point, Oswald’s military record becomes most murky, and the hand of someone in the Pentagon seems to be the cause.  Oswald was apparently giving cause for being dismissed from the service so that he could defect more effectively to Moscow – what was dressed up after the assassination to make it look as if he were just a growing undesirable.  He was court-martialed twice but the convictions did nothing to slow his advancement.  There were unsubstantiated claims about him deliberately wounding himself, and contracting a serious venereal disease.  Then the Pentagon was most unclear about his security status, what he was being paid, and where he was serving.  “In the controversy over the alleged assassin’s true colors,” Summers concluded, “this period is pivotal.”

 

Matters became even worse when James Bamford got round to recounting the Dallas assassination and the Warren Commission in Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World (p. 130ff.)  “That Friday was slow in the NSA Sigint Command Center,” Bamford wrote.  There is no mention of the downing of Hyde’s U-2 flight, and the disappearance of the pilot – what had taken the super powers to the brink of nuclear war when Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr.’s U-2 was shot down over Cuba during the midst of the Missile Crisis. Even when NSA did a massive review of all its SIGINT intercepts, there was still nothing about Hyde’s whereabouts and recovering the plane, even if it was the result of an accident, but plenty about Oswald and his associates. (p. 132ff.)

 

More important, Ledford arranged, it seems, for Captain Hyde to have apparently died a hero while providing him with a new identity as one Horace Smith, name given because of Hyde’s affection for the English poet’s sonnets. – what covered up the whole mess since he was no longer available to answer troubling questions.  In May 1964, Hyde’s wife, holding infant son Joe Glenn III, was awarded his Distinguished Flying Cross for displaying “heroism while participating in aerial flights on Jan. 19”, the citation read, and what seems to have been on January 19, 1963 since he was supposedly dead a year later when NSA McGeorge Bundy tasked the NRO to make sure that the Soviets were honoring the terms of the Missile Crisis settlement despite the bad-mouthing they were receiving about LBJ regarding KGB involvement in the assassination from former Kennedy confidant Charles Bartlett. (For details, see Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”, p. 348ff.)

 

Yet, Hyde allegedly took part in the aerial surveillance on January 19, 1964 when he was officially dead as there were no least bit threatening flights on the previous January 19th, ones during which he “obtained information of vital importance to the security of the United States.” (Quoted from The LaGrange Daily News, May 4, 1964, p. 1.)  In January 1963, Soviet-American relations were the best in years, Khrushchev having just sent Castro a conciliatory letter to patch up the long-term relationship with the island after the crisis, hardly what would merit the DFC for observing high in the sky. The point was reiterated when there was no mention of any such flight when Hyde received a Fifth Oak Leaf Cluster to the Air Medal for “meritorious achievement participating in aerial flight as an aircraft commander between July 9 and Aug. 29, 1963, on Oct. 18, 1963, and on Nov. 5, 1963.” (Quoted from ibid.) 

 

For good measure about Hyde’s well-being, there was no mention of any Purple Heart – what any member of the Armed Forces automatically receives for being killed or wounded in any action against an enemy of the United States or by an opposing armed force of a foreign country in which American forces are or have been engaged.

 

While Ledford was helping extract the NRO from an imbroglio with Cuba which might well have resulted in a large-scale war with the Soviets because of the cock-up surrounding the JFK assassination, the agency shifted the action to the Far East where the Johnson administration was reassessing its objectives because of the rapidly deteriorating situation there, and fully committed to giving its communists a most bloody nose because of its frustrations over Castro. 

 

In February 1964, Washington started Operation Plan 34-A, a program of covert operations against North Vietnam.  “Through 1964,” Neil Sheehan wrote in the paperback edition of The Pentagon Papers – a most belated article entitled “The Covert War” – “the 34-A operations ranged from flights over North Vietnam by U-2 spy planes and kidnappings of North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence information, to parachuting sabotage and psychological-warfare teams into the North, commando raids from the sea to blow up rail and highway bridges and the bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT boats.” (p. 238) 

 

The NRO’s reconnaissance flights, code-named Yankee Team, gathered photographic intelligence which led to a fleet of T-28 fighter bombers, carrying Laotian Air Force markings, and piloted by Air America and Laotian pilots, which attacked regularly Pathet Lao troops in Laos, and North Vietnamese targets. “An average of four flights per week have covered the bulk of Oplan 34-A targets,” State Department Assistant Secretary of State Marshall Green reported on November 7, 1964. 

 

The program was the brain-child of the Pentagon’s Lt. Colonels Al Haig, and Dewitt Smith – what Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson had ordered after a distressing trip to South Vietnam right after the JFK assassination.  “Make a list is what we did, starting out, as was the style of the Pentagon in those days, with the actions least likely to rock the boat,” Haig explained most disingenuously in Inner Circles. “They were mostly recommendations to shore up the existing effort in the South.” (p. 137)  After a year of such “routine” recommendations, though, the clueless President Johnson could not no longer stomach them, exclaiming heatedly to the General Johnson:  “Bomb, bomb, bomb. That’s all you know.” (Quoted from George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, p.11.)      

 

On March 17th, National Security Action Memorandum 288 was adopted, calling for US forces to be ready to initiate a full range of Laotian and Cambodian “Border Control actions”, and “Retaliatory Actions” against North Vietnam on 72 hours’ notice, “and to be in a position on 30 days’ notice to initiate the program of ‘Graduated Overt Military Pressure’ against North Vietnam….” (Quoted from Robert J. McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, p. 208.)

 

To trigger such a response against the North, the destroyer USS Maddox, filled with electronic spying equipment, intruded into North Vietnamese waters at the end of July, hoping to provoke a military response by the edgy North Vietnamese.  In February, the USS Craig had carried out the first of these DeSoto missions, but it had come up empty-handed because Hanoi did not want to provide the Americans with a pretext for expanding the war at its expense.  This Desoto missions were combined with South Vietnamese commando raids on the North Vietnamese islands of Hon Me and Ngu in order to increase the possibilities of a serious incident – what would provoke a retaliatory action against the North.

 

Despite the fact that  the vessels appeared to be working together, and the Maddox was clearly trying to provoke trouble, the North Vietnamese still were most cautious in their response until the American ship came within easy range of Hon Me which was still clearing up the damage done by the South Vietnamese commandos.  By the time the Sigint operators on the destroyer determined from North Vietnamese naval messages that its ships were finally preparing to attack, the destroyer was safely out of range, its three torpedo boats allegedly firing one torpedo each at the disappearing target.   

 

Instead of forgetting about the missions, though, as SOD Robert McNamara considered them useless, a beefed-up mission took place on August 3rd, with the USS Turner Joy joining the Maddox, and the South Vietnamese using a four-boat raiding party which shelled a radar station and a security post on the North Vietnamese mainland.  In the ensuing melee the next morning, the American vessels “…issued more than twenty reports of automatic weapons fire, torpedo attacks, and other hostile action.  But in the end, no damage was sustained, and serious questions arose as to whether any such attack actually took place.” (Quoted from Bamford, p. 299.)

 

While the reports created a controversy down to the present day about what really happened, they were just another hoax to justify aggressive action – what the ‘downing’ of Hyde’s U-2 had been intended for. As Bamford indicated but did not adequately explain, an NSA analyst was relying upon intercepts they had already received from the NRO about the earlier imminent attack, the first one, upon the destroyer – one message from North Vietnamese naval headquarters in Haiphong giving a patrol boat its position, and another for patrol boats and if possible a torpedo boat to prepare for military operations – which were passed on to the captain of the Maddox. 

 

Little wonder that when McNamara was questioned about the legitimacy of taking the fight to the North, he responded that there was ‘unequivocal proof’:  “…the highly secret NSA intercept reports sent to the Maddox on August 4 as a warning.” (Quoted from ibid.)  While Ledford’s people had apparently resent them to bolster the cause, the recycled intercepts worked for the Pentagon, the White House, and Congress – resulting in passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, giving LBJ complete power to conduct the war –  and NRO’s operational chief was duly rewarded for his services, receiving the Distinguished Service Medal when he took his leave from office early the next year.

 

While the expanded war in Vietnam greatly increased tactical operations by the NRO’s fixed-wing components, it soon created devastating leaks by NSA’s Robert Lipka, an army clerk assigned to shredding its highly secret intercepts at Fort Meade. As with B. F. Mitchell in the Gary Powers affair, the youthful Lipka became totally cynical because of what he saw, deciding that since his colleagues manipulated evidence for their own, selfish purposes, he could do likewise.  In September 1965, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and volunteered his services to the KGB resident.  During the next two years, Lipka provided the residency through 50 contacts with so much material about America’s conduct of the war – for which he received $27,000 –  that the KGB was obliged to assign Oleg Kalugin the job of reducing it to manageable proportions.

 

And Washington did not learn of Lipka’s betrayals until after the Cold War was over.  When his term of service ended in 1967, he simply returned to civilian life, apparently only contacting the Soviets, on occasion, in the hope of obtaining from them more money because of the intelligence he had provided. And while assessing the American failure in Vietnam has resulted in almost endless volumes, almost nothing in them is about communist spying, particularly Lipka’s, though it, along with a lack of concern about security, seems most important in helping explain the defeat – as Lt. Gen. Charles R. Myer, a SIGINT officer who twice served in Vietnam, explained:  “The enemy might disappear from a location just before a planned U. S. attack.  B-52 bomber strikes did not produce expected results because the enemy apparently anticipated them.”  (Quoted from ibid., p. 304.)

 

In fact, Bamford never mentioned Lipka’s spying, though he went to great lengths to describe the consequences of the spying by another walk-in in October 1967 – that of John Walker aka James Harper whose disclosures were so helpful in capturing the USS Pueblo off North Korea shortly thereafter.  When Bamford got the chance to talk to the KGB chief of station in Washington at the time, Boris A. Solomatin, he asked him if Walker was responsible for the failure of Operation Rolling Thunder.  “Walker is not responsible for your failures in bombing in North Vietnam,” the former KGB Major General replied. (p. 307)  The information handed over by Walker, according to Solomatin, was never supplied to the North Vietnamese or any other Soviet allies – a claim that his former subordinate Kalugin understandably denied but failed to explain in a direct way – and Banford was willing to let it go at that! 

 

The fact that the Soviets neither pressured Lipka to stay on at NSA nor offered considerable sums to make the prospect more attractive indicates that Moscow had learned enough from his two years of spying to require no more, as Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin indicated in an amazing footnote in The Sword and the Shield: “A later analysis by the Centre singled out 200 documents from NSA, the CIA, State Department and other federal agencies as of particular value.  Mitrokhin’s notes, alas, give no details of their contents.” (n. 12, p. 611)  To help cover up the inexplicable failure, Andrew still volunteered falsely that Mitrokhin had identified Lipka “…as a KGB agent.” (p. 18)    

 

The documents obviously gave Moscow all it needed to know about American’s conduct of the war in Vietnam, its modus operandi – what other agents, particularly Viet Cong ones, could use and expand upon in combating the Americans – and the absence of notes by Mitrokhin speaks volumes about the inadequacy of his archive. Viet Cong SIGINT prevented very few surprises from the air because of advance warning, and on the ground because of poor security of communications by American forces.  If Lipka’s take – apparently the most successful of the American spies, despite the hoopla about agents like Ames and Hanssen, did not merit special analysis – whose did?

 

And the fact was underlined when Andrew claimed that American prosecutors were holding Mitrokhin in reserve when Lipka was finally tried in Philadelphia in May 1997 for the spying he had committed 30 years earlier. While it was quite clear that the FBI started a surveillance of him by an agent feigning to be a KGB agent in May 1993 – months before the Bureau started acting on Mitrokhin’s leads – after his former wife had charged that he had worked for the Soviets while at NSA, and had gotten the goods on him by paying a demanded $10,000 for previous services rendered to the KGB, US authorities tried to make out that Mitrokhin, “the mystery witness”, had gotten Lipka to confess.  It was all eyewash to make Mitrokhin feel better about having defected, and the public better about Lipka escaping death, as he was only sentenced to 18 years in prison with time off for good behavior.  

 

It would have been a far different result if the NSA had come clean about what he had betrayed – what Kalugin would not recall the content of because of its sheer volume, and Mitrokhin, it seems, had amazingly not gone to the trouble of making notes of, making one wonder if he ever saw anything.  Of course, for NSA to have done so would have shown the public just how crucial – even at this late date – his leaks had been to America’s withdrawal, and Vietnam’s fall to the communists. By the time Lipka left the Agency, the CIA had even concluded that carrying to war to the North (Operation Rolling Thunder) had been a decided failure, stiffening the enemy’s resistance while only achieving limited results.

 

To make sure that the public did not get wind of why the war in Vietnam was escalated, and still going so badly, Washington revived in November 1967 the allegations about the Tonkin Gulf attacks being fakes to make sure that NRO’s liberties during them did not resurface. With the national consensus about the war’s wisdom breaking down, and Senator Fulbright looking into holding Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings about what had gone wrong, John White, a naval officer on the USS Pine Island, took great umbrage at The New Haven Register‘s editorial, claiming that the anti-war movement was just helping the enemy.  White responded by stating that the “attacks” were fabricated. “I learned this by speaking with the chief sonarman of the Maddox,” he wrote on the front page of June 1976 issue of The National Exchange, “who was in the sonar room during the ‘attack’.”  White added that he was also the best source under the circumstances.

 

Once White had sent a copy of his letter to Fulbright, the former naval officer’s claims started getting national coverage on tv, in newspapers around the globe, and in a documentary, ultimately obliging him to give testimony about the affair for Fulbright’s committee in Washington.  White claimed that he had seen secret messages from the Maddox, first describing the attack, and then another one stating that it might have all been a mistake because of its malfunctioning sonar. Several months later, back at Long Beach, California, White testified that he met the chief sonarman responsible for the secret reports, and he claimed that no torpedoes had been fired during the second incident. White’s testimony helped persuade Fulbright to hold hearings on the matter in January 1968.

 

The hearings turned out to be a fiasco because White could not remember enough details of the messages, and the name of the chief sonarman and his whereabouts.  This was when support for the war was breaking down – Martin Luther King was marching on Washington to protest a war which Robert Kennedy stated was unwinnable – and the hearings could have speeded its end.  Hawkish SOD McNamara had now turned into a dove, and had resigned because the Joint Chiefs would not agree to a bombing halt, and to fight the war with just the troops there then.

 

Instead of White identifying the chief sonarman, and his coming forward to testify, the field was left open to sonar personnel who had been on the Maddox, and they completely destroyed White’s basic claim.  And he later made no attempt to find the chief petty officer after staff on the Fulbright committee informed him that it had been informed that he did exist, and that he had told another seaman the same story. Of course, it would it would have been a far different matter if White, who claimed to have seen all the SIGINT, had stated that the NRO had deliberately recycled the intercepts before the first confrontation in order to provoke the second, crucial one.

 

By this time Dr. Alexander Flax was well entrenched as NRO’s director, having taken over from Dr. McMillan in October 1965 when the Gemini Project for preparing men and space vehicles for landing and returning from the moon (Apollo Project), and LBJ’s ground war in Vietnam were well underway.  Flax was an excellent administrator who needed no operational commander like General Ledford – able to keep the Apollo mission on course with NASA, while still developing reconnaissance vehicles, especially satellites, for the NRO, and seeing that its capability was used most effectively in the field.  This was no small feat, given the fact that LBJ’s prominent hawks, especially SOD McNamara and NSA McGeorge Bundy, were beginning to seek a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, and the American public was starting to speak out against the war.   

 

While historians have generally tried to veil the cause of these unexpected results by stressing underestimations of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese strength throughout, the Johnson administration knew that something was terribly wrong – i. e., the enemy simply knew too much about what was going on – and assigned the Bureau, then the CIA, and NSA to intensify efforts to discover possible spying. The Bureau initiated Operation COINTELPRO – a program to discredit communists and radicals opposed to the war, and what I became a target of after I wrote President Johnson, criticising its expansion after he had run in the 1964 election as the peace candidate.  CIA followed suit in July 1968 with MH/CHAOS, keeping tabs on the actions by America’s political activists. (See the article in the codshit.com Archive about my confessions as a college teacher for more.)  And NSA expanded its Operation SHAMROCK – getting all the transmitters of diplomatic telegrams to hand them over to American authorities.

 

The NRO’s assignment in these matters was to intensify efforts to win the war in Vietnam before its support at home collapsed – no small duties given the scope of potential opposition, especially among the scientific community and the social elite.  The crisis occurred in the spring of 1967 when LBJ was faced with the dilemma of whether to go all out to win the war, as the Joint Chiefs recommended, or an order a bombing halt and consider rolling back search and destroy missions, as McNamara urged.  The fat was in the fire when Johnson seriously entertained, thanks to support from leading scientists, that an elaborate electronic barrier be constructed across the Demilitarized Zone in lieu of the bombing.

 

To counter the threat, Flax arranged with the CIA’s new Director Richard Helms Operation Phoenix, the program, started under William Colby in June 1967, to eliminate the Viet Cong’s infrastructure – its alleged organization of spies and political commissars – using all kinds of special forces, and NRO intelligence.  During the next five years, it killed around 35-40,000 suspected Vietnamese terrorists with secret ambushes, daring assaults, and surprise assassinations – the forerunner of todays “war on terrorism”.  The purpose of the operation was to terrorize the Vietnamese into submission.

 

Then the United States Intelligence Board tasked NSA to check on all individuals dealing with Castro, alleging that they could be engaged in drug-trafficking, plotting the President’s assassination, and aiding and abetting the communist enemy.  The White House apparently believed that Hanoi was somehow funding opposition to the war through Havana, and it wanted all the information that could be gleaned, especially by satellites, about people like former CIA agent Stanley Sheinbaum, former Green Beret veteran Donald Duncan, the backers, organizers and writers of Ramparts magazine, Congressmen George Brown, Phillip Burton, Don Edwards, John Dow, Benjamin Rosenthal, John Conyers and others, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Jane Fonda, etc. NRO’s role in all this was most troubling as it indicated that apparent law-biding citizens were engaged in treason and espionage.

 

NSA, NRO and the country would pay a high price for these illegal liberties.       

                 

While the content of what cameras and eavesdropping devices, as microwave communications became more common, gleaned during satellite flights over the USSR and other strategically important locations are almost impossible to determine, we do know that it was the most highly prized information that the United States possessed, and what it went to the greatest lengths to protect. And this was no small achievement, given the fact that the NRO is by far the largest funded intelligence agency in America, but thanks to the fact that its operations are almost all Special Access Programs (SAPs) where any oversight is at a premium, no one on the outside really knows for sure what it is doing.   

  

 

 

See Also:  A History of America’s National Reconnaissance Office – part 1

 

 

2005-6 Pakistan and Iran Earthquakes: National Reconnaissance Office Struggled To Keep Up

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The increasingly restricted view that Naomi Klein provided about the role of man in the making of disasters – whether they be natural or deliberate of some sort or another – had already experienced unprecedented feedback by Senator Jay Rockefeller and a few other Democratic colleagues on its super secret Intelligence Committee.The previous December they had objected to yet another National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Misty satellite being in the works, action which he had twice tried to stop, and called “totally unjustified and very, very wasteful and dangerous to the national security.” What he was referring to – though no one had yet claimed SIGINT satellites “very, very… dangerous” – was so sensitive that the NRO had called upon the Justice Department to look into the prosecution of any alleged leaker.
Klein’s failure to investigate the ramifications of this development, much less write about it – given what happened during the 2005 hurricane season – is simply mystifying.

For more, see this link:

http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/16/senate_democrats_protest_top_secret_spy

Of course, given this essential news blackout about covert possibilities, the NRO had been able to move against the growing problems in Pakistan whose Balochistan, Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), North-West Frontier Province, Swat Valley and Pakistan-administered Kashmir were becoming increasingly Taliban and Al-Qaeda dominated despite what Washington had dictated to strong-man President Pervez Musharraf. He had staged a coup in 1999 against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over the conduct of the war with India over Kashmir, and received $10.5 billion in aid from the West, once he had capitulated to threats of being attacked unless he didn’t join the so-called war on terror. While he supplied three airbases for the conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom, he never really went after the Taliban because of his own strategic interests and needs, causing so much consternation in Washington that it finally decided to fix the problem as best it could.

About the situation around 2005, Ahmed Rashid has written in a 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books, “Pakistan on the Brink,” the target area had become an absolute powder keg, thanks to the inaction of the Musharraf regime though somehow making no mention of the earthquake then. Maulana Muhamed had so used his FM radio station with inflammatory messages in the Swat valley that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban built up several more stations and an army for him. In FATA, the Pashtun tribal leaders had organized their own militias, and plans for the liberation of Pakistan, slitting the throats of some 300 pro-government ones in the process. In the meantime, the Afghan Taliban, thanks to the inaction of the relevant Pakistani authorities and the assistance from FATA and Balochistan, revived their insurgency in Afghanistan. And extremist Punjabi groups joined the mix after Pakistan’s relations with India over Kashmir cooled down.

Pakistan, like most of the countries between China and Morocco, has its own system of qanats, called karezes. These are the underground systems of water collection which rely upon a central well under the surface to supply entrance to a collecting chamber at the lowest ground level, so that fields can be irrigated, and populations supplied with the basic essentials. They can be vast distances in length with tunnels along the way for more collections, and proper ventilation, While Iran was thought to be the source of Pakistan’s systems – what the NRO had taken advantage of in making its 1990 and 2003 earthquakes – actually the design of its karezes are thought to have come from Afghanistan. While pipes have replaced tunnels in many Pakistani kerezes, making them less manipulable from outside forces, delay-action dams to collect more water have made them more unstable if so attacked.

For more, see this link:
http://pakistaniat.com/2006/09/20/karez-balochistan-pakistan-irrigation/

Again, Professor Zhoughao Shou predicted the Paskistani earthquake, as he had those off the coast of Aceh in November-December 2004, but no one in a position of authority took them seriously. In the December 2006 issue of the “New Concepts in Global Tectonics” Newsletter, he laid out his findings about recent serious earthquakes in “Precursor of the Largest Earthquake of the Last Forty Years,” pp. 3-12. His critics believed that earthquakes always started deep underground, thanks to tectonic plates crashing together, and that there were never visible precursors of them. Shou continued to say that his vapor theory about cloud formation over earthquake epicenters, and their unexpected movement – contrary to usual weather patterns – demonstrated otherwise.

After a discussion of Shou’s claims, the newsletter concluded: “This work demonstrates that the vapor theory does not give false warnings. Shou’s recent investigation shows that all earthquakes of magnitude 7 or above in the world from June 1993 to October 2005 have a vapor precursor. In contrast, government seismologists worldwide have not yet made a precise and reliable prediction.” This seems to say more about their character than that of various earthquakes.

Still, Shou made no attempt to explain the cause of the cloud formations, and many of them could well be from plates rubbing together, volcanic action, etc. The Pakistani one appeared just too convenient politically, and suspiciously connected to the Misty satellite passing overhead every 90 minutes to be of natural origin. The next to last passage overhead caused a minor earthquake, and after all the inhabitants around Muzaffarabad had gone back to bed after their morning tea, as it was Ramadam, the devastating one occurred 90 minutes later, killing 86,000 people, and rendering another 500,000 homeless.

When the Musharraf government acted most positively to offers of assistance, Washington was uncharacteristically most supportive of disaster relief occurring anywhere along the “axis of evil”. It airlifted 1,200 military personnel, 162 cargo lifts of equipment, and 1,900 tons of supplies. With the opening up of the Taliban-dominated area to American forces, the Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios announced to a November Reconstruction Conference that it was providing the Paskistanis with $300 million in aid, the Pentagon was throwing in another $110 million, and private charities would be adding another $100 million.

Despite all the hoopla about this assistance of save the living, and subsequent aid to help them progress, Pakistan was in even worse shape than Afghanistan afterwards, thanks in part to the continuing silence by those in the media and in politics who knew about its real causes but have failed to speak out, as Rashid has concluded:

“In Pakistan there is no such broad national identity or unity. Many young Balochs today are fiercely determined to create an independent Balochistan. The ethnic identities of the people in the other provinces have become a driving force for disunity. The gap between the rich and poor has never been greater….There is confusion about what actually constitutes a threat to the state and what is needed for nation-building.” (p. 16)

While the NRO had pulled off the man-made earthquake around Muzaffarabad, Pakistan on October 8, 2005 without a hitch, the Bush administration still had to be worried about unexpected, damaging blowback, how to exploit the new openings, how to provide a few fall guys for what the real covert culprits had done, how to get rid of them in an orderly, unthreatening fashion, find suitable, accommodating replacements for them, and provide new cover for the most powerful space weapons, so that more mayhem could be conducted with the least suspicions by the media and the public about what was really going on. In sum, it was time to make for a clean slate on the covert front so that more beneficial disaster capitalism could occur.

As soon as the Reconstruction Conference on Pakistan in November 2005 showed that the United States was most pleased with Mushrarraf’s settlement of its laser-caused earthquake – opening up its territories bordering on Afghanistan to American covert operations – the Bush administration replaced acting Air Force Secretary Peter Geren, the Pentagon’s all-purpose fixer, by Michael Wynne. He was another Pentagon insider – former acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics – who was responsible for the development, testing and purchase of all new weapons systems, especially high-powered laser devices which the Air Force was taking the running of from Dr. Donald Kerr’s NRO. This was just part of the Pentagon’s game of musical chairs to keep the media and the public in the dark as Geren immediately became the Army’s Undersecretary, and then its Secretary when the current one was made a fall guy for the failures of veterans at Walter Reed Hospital.

With Geren conveniently out of the way, whistle-blower Russell Tice then claimed that the National Security Agency (NSA) – the NRO’s official superior – was mining the private actions of millions of Americans, what President Bush had claimed only concerned a small number of Americans in a focused way. The same day that The New York Times published Tice’s anonymous contentions, he told ABC he was the source, as this link explains:

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1491889

Of course, this touched off a running firestorm about what NSA was doing, one which is still continuing, leaving the NRO securely high-and-dry about what it had been engaged in. One could hardly have had much doubt about what NSA was doing under Director Michael Hayden despite the surprises expressed by NYT reporter James Risen, and author James Bamford in Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World, given Bush’s views of the President’s war powers. While Risen had been Tice’s messenger, Bamford had been given a complete snowjob about what NSA had been experiencing, and doing when it came to its eavesdropping, especially when it came to signal intelligence (SIGINT), when he visited the Director. (See p.451ff.)

Hayden – with the help of former House Intelligence Committee chairman and now DCI Porter Goss, the Committee’s former staff director John Millis, former NSA Director and now Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and others – had given a most pessimistic appraisal of its SIGINT capability aka Echelon while dragging the USS Jimmy Carter needlessly into the process, acting as if it was essentially to be involved in tapping fiber-optic cables, and as if the USS Parche, the Navy’s most decorated sub in this regard, was no longer in commission to do it. Bamford’s sources gave the totally false impression that NSA was in no position to keep up with threats being facilitated by the use of personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, e-mails and fiber optics – a process further complicated by the delayed commissioning of the Carter. (p. 465)

In giving this most restricted account of NSA’s muscle, Bamford restricted the sub’s SIGINT capability beyond recognition, acting as if it were only an underwater messenger of what others were saying rather than a platform for striking back in all kinds of ways from its Multi-Mission Platform. There was no mention of its being a sub with a completely different mission, one where it could leave behind munitions, not just mines, to explode when it was convenient and safe, and SIGINT capability to convert messages – apparently from air guns and laser acoustic weapons though they were not mentioned – which would give the recipient more than he or it expected. In doing so, Bamford used an unnamed Los Angeles Times source rather than what Rear Admiral J. P. Davis had written in “USS Jimmy Carter (SSN23): Expanding Future SSN Missions” in the fall 1999 issue of Undersea Warfare:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1999/ussjimmycarter.htm [Link revised.]

With Pakistan completely split open because of the earthquake, the Pentagon’s ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOTs) took full advantage of the new opportunities – what they had previously been mainly doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and around Saudi Arabia where Major General Stanley McChrystal, who had become Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in September 2003, saw fit. McChrystal was a former ‘notorious psychopath’ Ranger who was working the ‘dark side’ missions that Vice President Dick Cheney had said were required after the 9/11 attacks. McChrystal embodied the tactics which characterized the covert growth of America’s hidden empire – organizing teams to carry out extra-judicial killings, systematic torture of prisoners, bombing of communities to make them more cooperative, and search and destroy missions.

“The SOT’s,” Professor James Petras recently wrote about Washington’s continuing covert wars, “specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US clients regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-economic groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT’s targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes.”

These operations in Pakistan were well underway when General McChrystal in February 2006 became Commander, JSOC. It had already attempted to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri by an air-strike in Damadola, eliminating senior commanders Abu Khabab al-Masri and Iman Asad allegedly in the process, and attacking the Danda Saidgai training camp in Northwest Waziristan. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban responded by assassinating the US consul in Karachi, and by the end of the year, given the escalating ‘dirty war’, controlled not only the province but also South Waziristan. It’s much easier to expand wars rather than end them.

Encouraged by early results in Pakistan, Michael Wynne’s Air Force – now the operator of the NRO’s heavy, laser satellites – was authorized to give Iran, it seems, another dose, targeting the strategic area equidistant between Baghdad and Tehran in the Shia heartland on March 31, 2006. Encouraged by the agreement the Security Council had just reached that Iran should never obtain nuclear weapons, Washington hit the only area in Iran not known for having earthquakes, and did so during another nighttime operation which would have killed thousands of people, like earlier at Bam, instead of only 70 if it had not been for the action by its Unexpected Disaster Committee – as if normally disasters are expected! Once the first earthquake occurred early during the night of the 30th, it roused the population from its beds, assuming that more would occur, and two more did just after midnight local time.

Of course, by this time relations between Washington and Tehran had so soured that it did not even ask for help, as it had after the Bam earthquake. And President Bush had geopolitical matters so much on his mind that he said this twice about the earthquakes: “We obviously have our differences with the Iranian government but we do care about the suffering of the Iranian people. Secretary of State Condi Rice uttered similar “deep sympathy” for the suffering of the Iranian people, offering to supply aid, but none was forthcoming according to Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman. Iranian-American relations had descended to such a low point that hardly any niceties were in order.

The reason for the icy relations is not hard to determine if one reads the details about the earthquakes, and the damage they wrought. They occurred in two separate places – in the mountainous area noted for its agricultural operations, the epicenter well removed from the alleged fault line which official seismologists say caused it, and in the area around the cities of Boroujerd and Doroud. The agricultural area relies heavily upon its qanat (kanat in arabic) systems for providing the necessary water for its fields of grain and fruit orchards The earthquakes were surprisingly close to the surface, only going down about seven kilometers.

Then almost all the killing and damage occurred in the mountains where the first 4.7 earthquake hit, resulting the the vast majority of the 70 human deaths, and 1,000 large livestock and 6,000 small livestock ones – killed when their barns and sheds collapsed. Most noticeable was the dozens of dead sheep and goats found in the fields, apparently killed by the lasers beams when they heated up the kilometers of kanats in the process. This is why they have always been used in the night – what the NRO shoulder patches were bragging about it owning – so as not to commit most suspicious human deaths rather than simply ones in their beds. Great destruction and damage was also done to deep wells, water storage areas, and 4,500 meters of kanats.

With the Bush administration now hopeful that it had finally turned the corner on Iraqi violence after the ouster of Saddam Hussein – what SOD Rumsfeld may have planned from the beginning with his ‘shock and awe’ campaign in the hope that its post-liberation mayhem would kill off the necessary Sunni and Shia troublemakers – he now prepared his departure from the Pentagon. While a few generals and admirals were finally expressing their displeasure about what had happened during his preventive wars – what Rumsfeld even acknowledged – he wrote a secret memo on April 6th, calling upon his minions to “keep elevating the threat…”.

While the ignorant might think that he was referring to more 9/11 style attacks, he added this to make sure that there was no confusion about what he meant, but not in the places threatened: “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize that they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists.” (“Rumsfeld ‘kept up fear of terror attacks’,” The Daily Telegraph, March 11, 2007) In doing so, he deliberately ignored what Iran, Pakistan and North Korea were apparently aiming for with their nuclear programs, and what the Pentagon was doing its utmost to prevent. It all sounded like his swan song from the Pentagon, reminiscent of his Anchor Memo when he took office with the intention of fixing it despite all the governmental obstacles.

While Rumsfeld withheld announcing his resignation until the day of the 2006 Congressional elections, though it so leaked to the press so that the voters would know he was leaving – hoping that the long-awaited act would bolster Republican chances at the polls but it didn’t, causing the Bush administration to lose control of Congress – it immediately nominated everyone’s choice, former DCI Robert Gates, to be his successor, and he was confirmed in record time. Gates had been former President Bush’s replacement of DCI William Webster, and achieved the kind of coordination between the Agency and the Bureau – especially in handling the Iran-Contra cover-up which cost him the job the first time after Reagan had nominated him to replace William Casey – which the gigantic Pentagon so sorely needed now. (For more on this, see Mark Riebling, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, p. 381ff.)

Gates’ first victim, after a prudent pause, was DCI Porter Goss in May 2006 who he knew all too well after his long career in the Agency. Goss avoided analyzing intelligence too much, as his dismissing the leading analysts in the Agency showed when he took over, and was too careless in his private life – what had led to his forced retirement when he came down with venereal disease after visiting, as many high-flying bachelors in Washington did, the prostitution ring aka “Capitol Couples” that Hana and Karl Koecher were running for the Czechoslovak security and intelligence service. “Hana, blonde, attractive and ten years younger than her husband,” Christopher Andrew wrote in The Sword and the Shield, “later boasted that she had had sex with numerous CIA personnel, Pentagon officials, reporters from major newspapers and a US Senator.” (p. 200)

Three days later, after it was learned that Goss’ Executive Director, Kyle ‘Dusty’ Foggo, had been having sex parties with Hana, he too was gone, though the Agency denied that there was any connection between the resignations. Foggo had been instrumental in arranging the heating up of Hurricane Katrina, and slowing the response to it, and had had a corrupt relationship, involving former acting Air Force Secretary Geren, in kickbacks Boeing was giving out. Of course, the cause of his resignation was just the cover story as this had been known for at least a quarter century, and it claimed that Foggo had had to go because he was sharing her with Soviet spy, Felix Bloch, rather than with Goss too.

Little wonder that NSA director Major General Michael Hayden then followed Goss as DCI. Hayden knew where most eavesdropping secrets were buried, and how best to keep them covered up. John Negroponte, the new Director of National Intelligence and former US Ambassador to Iraq, knew most about the personnel problems at CIA, and arranged the necessary changes.

Steven Kappes, the former DDO who had resigned because of Goss’ Chief of Staff Pat Murray so politicizing the Agency, was brought back as the new Deputy Director – Negroponte having been informed by Mary Margaret Graham, an Assistant Deputy Director of Counterintelligence, of all the womanizing and politicizing there. This had been particularly difficult for Negroponte, the former American Ambassador to Honduras, because Foggo had been a close associate involved in its search and destroy missions, organized from the embassy. Most important, Robert Richer, the number 2 man in the DO who resigned suddenly during Hurricane Katrina because of the DCI’s isolated decision-making, had to find a new place, becoming CEO of Cofer Black’s Total Intelligence Solutions in 2007.

The most important decisions then were made by Negroponte, and his replacement at National Intelligence, Mike McConnell. The plan was to make sure that everyone believed that the Pentagon was apparently not planning a new generation of space-based surveillance satellites, and the ones it already had were being destroyed. At the same time, NRO Director Donald Kerr left, having transferred the last vestiges of its heavy satellite, SIGINT operations to the Air Force, and by replacing the aggressive shoulder patch – showing one of its four orbiting satellites hitting back at unsuspecting targets, and bragging about its owning the night – with a most innocent one, showing just two orbits of satellites, circling the globe. Kerr was replaced by Scott Large.

Negroponte was most eager to tell the press, especially U. S. News and World Report, about the “managerial nightmare” he had in getting rid of the $25 billion, over-budget, and five-year behind Future Imagery Architecture System – what planned to establish in space dual purpose imagery and SIGINT satellites to do whatever was required. Poor quality control in the satellites, and technical problems with their operations raised questions about their ever being completed. Negroponte moved decisively to end the program, getting rid of half of the classified project – apparently the SIGINT half as the Air Force still had the Misty satellites which could perform the necessary send-back messages if necessary.

No sooner had McConnell been installed as Negroponte’s replacement as National Intelligence Director than he announced that he had closed down the production of the satellite spy program, and was in the process of finding out who was responsible for the hopeless boondoggle, seeing to his dismissal. McConnell, in stopping the production of more Misty satellites, said nothing about stopping the use of ones still in service. And he was apparently looking for Air Force Secretary MIchael Wynne who had been pushing their production, though McConnell conveniently postponed his search and Wynn’s firing until he was no longer needed. For more on this, see this link:

http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/satellite_spy_chief_scraps_satellite_program.htm

In this context, Naomi Klein’s latest, comprehensive survey of disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, appeared, and covert planners were most relieved to see that it had grown very little in its basic character, and in its coverage. The role of satellites, especially laser-equipped ones and submarines in their making, and their possible use on countries like Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and those around the Indian Ocean were never even alluded to. In fact, they, outside of Sri Lanka, were never even seriously mentioned in the whole process. Actually, she hardly said anything new about the subject since her damage-limitation story on the Katrina disaster.

If anything, according to her, shock doctrine was wearing off rather than increasing.

Turkey earthquake in Van – Man-Made???

It is not far fetched to view today’s tragedy in Van, Turkey as being another product of the United States’ NRO  ( National Reconnaissance Office)  group.

As pointed out in the series posted here, “Glimpses of America’s Man-Made Disasters”  by CIA analyst  Trowbridge H. Ford, there exists already the method for causing earthquakes in Turkey and Iran using space technology targeted at middle eastern aquifer systems.

Letting a super power off the hook after repeatedly committing acts of genocide and culture-cide  through advanced weapons, mercenaries and stooge-kingpins is going to reap the whirlwind soon. Not all of these secret programs are so secret anymore.

We will put up another item today of interest to those who follow the devilish doings of the NRO. It explains just how the US  fabricates  earthquakes using space-age weapons.

 Note: check the right sidebar for more articles by  Trowbridge H. Ford – F.C.